7 challenges faced by online training institutes and how TrainerCentral solves them

Training institutes are rapidly adopting hybrid and digital-first training models and learning is no longer limited to physical classrooms and whiteboards. Learners today have complete freedom to choose from a wide range of training institutes and access quality education anytime, from anywhere. 

While delivering training online offers flexibility and reach, running an online training institute is far from easy. Behind every smooth online class hosting, learner enrollment, or certificate issuance lies a series of operational, technical, and administrative challenges. For online training institute owners, understanding these challenges is crucial to build a sustainable training business.

In this blog post, we’ll take a deep dive into the challenges you may face when running an online training institute and how TrainerCentral helps overcome them. 

1. Managing and hosting courses

Pre-recorded or self-paced courses are one of the most popular training formats used by training institutes. They create content around a course topic and deliver it systematically, allowing students to access and learn the material at their own pace.

Hosting multi-media training content and setting up seamless content delivery systems are two of the core needs of an online training institute. 

Online training institutes create a large library of course content in the form of videos, PDFs, presentations, and audio files, and package them as training bundles for learners. As they scale, the volume of training materials increases, and it becomes more difficult to manage content categorically, and define a curriculum that systematically helps learners achieve desired outcomes. 

Delivering self-paced courses isn’t just about sharing a file with learners, it’s also about systematically delivering materials for desired outcomes. The training institute should ideally set multiple compliance policies in place to ensure that students diligently learn and consume content for desired outcomes.

Solution: 

TrainerCentral offers a robust course builder tool that helps training institutes create media-rich training curriculum to deliver the best possible learning experience. It also supports comprehensive course compliance tools that streamlines the way courses are delivered to students sequentially to ensure quality training.

2. Real-time training through live classes

A big chunk of training programs hosted by training institutes are live classes. The live class model is preferred by students because it provides a classroom-like experience. 

Trainers and students are connected via a video-conferencing tool and learning happens in real time. It may sound pretty straightforward to create a session and invite learners, but when scaling, institutes run multiple parallel sessions, making it difficult to manage enrollments, session invitations, reminders, and reporting. 

Most importantly, the bigger challenge for training institutes is to rely on an additional tool like Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams to host live classes. A separate dedicated tool adds more complexities, integration chaos, and overhead costs that can hurt business efficiency and growth. 

Solution: 

With TrainerCentral’s built-in live workshop capability, training institutes can seamlessly host live workshop and automate enrollments, payments, and reminders. Learners can access self-paced courses and attend live classes from a single portal without any hassle. No additional cost or tool chaos. 

3. Managing payments and enrollment

One of the most challenging aspects of running an online training institute is managing pricing and payments. Training institutes require a system in place to set pricing to each course, integrate their payment system, and automatically enroll the students to the respective course once the payment successful. 

Without having a tightly integrated automated system, the process of managing payments and enrollments can be quite tricky. In addition to the automated payment system, training institutes also need systems in place to manage their discount coupons, and affiliate systems that help improve sales.   

Automating taxes and invoices is yet another challenge that most institutes face. Training institutes sell courses across the world, so they need to have dynamic country-specific pricing and tax rules in place. 

Solution: 

With TrainerCentral’s payment management module, training institutes can set course pricing, integrate their preferred payment gateway, and generate invoices with tax calculations effortlessly. Institutes can also set country-specific pricing dynamically to help institutes expand into different markets. The discount coupon module makes it easy to generate time- and volume-based coupons that are tightly integrated with the payment systems. 

4. Certificate issuance and credibility

As soon as learners complete their courses, a certificate acknowledges their efforts and showcases it across various mediums as needed. Every certificate should have a unified template theme that carries the academy name and logo, learner’s name, course details, accreditation (if any), and a unique certificate identifier to avoid duplication or other malpractices. Manually designing certificates and issuing them to students when they complete courses is a tedious and inefficient process. 

Solution: 

TrainerCentral helps training institutes streamline the certificate issuance process by offering a comprehensive e-certification module. Using certificates that can be designed, learner and course details can be automatically included, and also include a unique certificate ID to ensure authenticity. This improves the overall efficiency and credibility for learners. 

5. Marketing and learner communications

Marketing automation is an integral part of a training institute’s growth. Every institute requires a website that lists all of the courses and workshops offered, showcases student reviews, and includes other details that help website visitors turn into paying students. Designing and managing a website by hiring a website designer can be a costly endeavor and can also delay launches. 

Learner communications is yet another crucial aspect that contributes to an improved learner experience and the success of a training institute. It’s important to stay on top of all communications related to lesson reminders, payment confirmations, upsells/cross sells, and community interactions. Without a system in place, it can easily get overwhelming handling communications on different platforms.  

Solution: 

TrainerCentral offers a comprehensive communication tool that streamlines all learner and communication interactions, as well as business management communications, in a single platform to enable a collaborative learning environment. In addition, institutes can also leverage the no-code website builder tool to design a fully functional website and landing pages for courses and live classes with ease. 

6. Managing trainers, students, and administrators

Online training institutes usually involve multiple stakeholders such as trainers, students, guest trainers, and administrators, so it’s important to set up clear systems, access control permissions, and workflows that help smooth out business operations and allow everyone to work efficiently. 

For instance, in a training institute there may be multiple trainers hosting different courses. Each trainer should have access to course materials, the ability to conduct classes, view learner reports, and participate in community interactions only for the courses they teach. In the same way, administrators don’t need access to courses, learner details, or reports. Their permissions can be restricted to payments and enrollments, which are part of their everyday work.

Manually setting up these systems can be cumbersome and often leads to operational issues that disrupt day-to-day work.

Solution: 

With TrainerCentral’s centralized access control systems, training institutes can easily manage users, automate access permissions, and set workflows based on their roles and responsibilities. This helps overcome the need to manage who can access what manually and helps keep day-to-day operations organized as the institute scales. Training institutes can also define permission rules for guest trainers and temporary staff, granting them access only for a specific course or a limited period of time.

7. Tool cost and white-labeling capabilities

Running an online training institute usually requires multiple tools for different needs, such as video-conferencing tools for live classes, course content hosting tools, a tool to manage ticketing and payments, communication tools, and a tool to issue e-certificates. 

Each tool may solve a specific problem, but using too many disconnected tools can greatly increase costs and add operational complexity. Subscription fees, special add-ons, tools integrations, and maintenance efforts start piling up, making it harder for institutes to streamline their operations.

In addition to high costs, consistent branding is another challenge many training institutes face. When learners interact with multiple third-party tools, it will be difficult for the training institute to maintain branding consistency and may affect the overall learning experience. For institutes looking to build a strong brand and long-term credibility, a centralized system that offers all of these tools in a unified place with deep white-labeling capabilities is a must-have.  

Solution: 

TrainerCentral provides a comprehensive training and business management platform that offers all of the necessary tools into a single platform, reducing the need for multiple tools and lowering overall operational costs. The platform also follows a transparent pricing policy, with no ambiguous pricing, add-on costs, or unexpected charges. It offers white-labeling options that allow training institutes to deliver a fully branded learning experience, starting from their academy website to the learner mobile app.

Conclusion

The online training landscape is rapidly growing and becoming increasingly competitive. This makes it even more important for training institutes to be diligent and invest ample time in choosing the right tech stack that supports their long-term business growth. Ideally, an online training institute management system should be flexible and adaptable, align well with day-to-day operational needs, and scale smoothly as the business expands. 

TrainerCentral recommends a practical approach to evaluating each tool by executing your existing real business workflows and then making a final decision based on what fits your business needs the best.