The old training consisted in a three-day training course with everyone who will later work with the LMS as administrator in different roles. It must be said that the administrators are, for example, HR employees or working in other specialist departments, i.e. people without an IT background.

Some of them see such a system for the first time during the training, which can be a bit intimidating. They have the fear or even expectation that they would have to learn everything about the LMS within three days; which is of course completely unrealistic. The training sessions themselves then consisted mainly of lots of slides, which was a bit of a blow for many customers.

My goal was to pick up the customer where he is and familiarise him with the system step by step. For this purpose, I developed the "Learning Suite Champion Path", which is held directly in the LMS and consists of several steps.

In addition to the Basic Training, which in the future every customer will receive automatically, there is the Advanced Training, which can be held either as face-to-face training or web session. In the Advanced Training, we look at a specific customer scenario, take another close look at the functions that can be used for this purpose and work out a solution together with the team.

Let's say, the customer would like to be trained in blended learning strategy. Then we consider together with the customer how we can best approach the topic and which functions are best suited for its implementation. I give tips and try to provide inspiration and best practice examples. In many cases, the customer doesn't know exactly what he/she needs or better: what is available.

My colleagues and I, therefore, act more as sparring partners than trainers for the customer in these sessions. Often there are many paths that lead to the goal and we must find out which path is best suited for the particular customer.

e challenge for us is to make a boring software training course as exciting and intuitive as possible. The customer should have fun and we must convey our knowledge in such a way that the logic of the system becomes clear and the customer also knows how versatile and flexible the system is.

But such a high degree of flexibility also requires a very high degree of complexity. This is an opportunity on the one hand, but also a challenge for every admin on the other. Therefore, it is also part of our task to take away the fear of the system from the customer.

1. Define requirements: The first and most important thing for me: You must know which requirements your LMS has to fulfil. How complex are my scenarios? It depends on this question how complex the LMS must be.
   The more flexibly the system can map processes, the more complex it is, of course. Here you have to think carefully about what you need. When in doubt, you should also get advice on this, otherwise you will end up with a system that is either too complex or cannot meet your requirements.
2. Clarify care and support: The second would be to pay attention to how well you are looked after. How do the training courses run, what does the support look like, and generally how am I guided through the implementation?
3. Define team building and responsibilities: This may not seem obvious at first glance, but I think it's very important. Often admin teams are thrown together wildly, and it is not clear who is responsible for what.
   For example, who is the system owner and contact person for other administrators? If the team is not clearly defined, misunderstandings occur again and again, which in the end also cost unnecessary time and money.

An opportunity to give employees knowledge they enjoy and what they not only see as a duty, but what makes them feel entertained and what they like to do. Good e-learning should also offer a change from the normal working day.

On the one hand, we wanted to show that we are moving with the times and are open to new technologies. On the other hand, there were of course also very practical reasons. We have around 1,300 employees at 19 locations and wanted to provide fast, direct information across locations without email traffic.

Sometimes it was also the case that employees travelled from location to location to hold training courses, which was neither up-to-date nor efficient. In addition, some employees were informed directly by their superiors about individual training courses, which led to a certain "dispersion loss". It was also never exactly known whether messages were received and read.

Basically, we simply wanted to bundle the whole topic of training and at the same time meet our obligations to provide evidence in respect of training on topics such as money laundering, compliance and data protection. But we also had other concrete problems that we wanted to solve.

What we really underestimated, on the one hand, was how time-consuming the administration of "Learning World" would be. On the other hand, it was difficult to find out which employees would actually be able to design visually appealing training courses.

With the Content Studio, which is included in the LMS, it is relatively easy to create training courses yourself, but they still must be created by someone with the appropriate expertise. Previously it was simply that PDFs were created for training courses and sent to the participants, but with the introduction of "Learning World" and its possibilities, the requirements have naturally grown, also of a graphical nature.

At the moment we mainly use classical presentations with speech synthesis. We once tried to record our own voices to make the whole thing more personal, but that was too time-consuming.

Then we started to use Content Studios artificial voice tool again, and now we're getting away from them. We found out that it simply isn't suitable for many of our employees to have a training with sound, because they can't play it anyway. If, for example, a salesman is sitting in the salesroom, the loud playback disturbs the colleagues. But sitting with headphones does not make a good impression on customers. It's also difficult for fitters who travel a lot.

Since automotive mechatronics technicians, service consultants and sales staff are our three largest professional groups, we tend to get away from speech synthesis in these groups.

The authors first received a two-day workshop from imc. That was a very good basic framework, but afterwards it was still a lot of learning by doing. We strongly supported each other and gathered a lot of feedback from the staff. That was very important for us, because we first had to learn what each individual employee group needed individually.

If, for example, it was self-explanatory for me to have to click on an arrow at the bottom right to go any further, it might not have been clear to an older employee from the assembly department. So, we had to get to know our target group and their needs and adapt the training specifically.

Very high almost throughout. We first had an official information event where Learning World was presented. In addition, our Executive Board, which was really behind the project from the very beginning, was personally very committed to it and, for example, talked about it again and again at works meetings. He also said to me once in fun: "If there are complaints, just refer the people directly to me".

With such a project a strong backing helps immensely and, in my opinion, this is also an advantage of SMEs. We can react more flexibly and are closer to our employees than is the case with large corporations.

But what was also extremely important for the acceptance of Learning World was to make it clear that we don't want to impose any additional work on the employees, on the contrary we want to save them work and paperwork. Although there are still a few sceptics who don't like these "new-fangled things", on the whole we received very positive feedback. Especially when the employees find out that it is the company's own colleagues who create the trainings, they find it great and are proud of our "S&G products".

Mostly yes. What we wanted above all was a reduction in paperwork and bureaucracy. The paperwork has really improved a lot, but we still have to struggle with the bureaucracy and the right settings.

But what is definitely already there is a significant time saving, since we were able to convert many classroom training sessions into online courses. In addition, the automated assignment of training courses and instructions saves us a lot of mail and time.

As a company, probably yes, as is often the case with large projects. Things are always added or interfered with that you haven't taken into account. In the beginning we didn't really know what possibilities there were and what we could do with the LMS.

As a person, however, I think I assessed it reasonably realistically, but only joined the project when the decision had already been made. I am an automotive salesman and worked in the human resources department of S&G. I also studied business administration and business psychology. My boss, however, wanted there to be a person with the main responsibility who already knew the company, so he brought me into the project team in 2017.

Therefore, because I am not a computer scientist, I had great respect for the topic and the scope. In the meantime, I've worked my way into it quite well and most of it runs relatively smoothly. Of course, there are always minor problems that you can't see coming before.

There are some topics that we still want to integrate. One example would be induction concepts for employees according to activity groups, which are currently still controlled manually by their superiors. In some cases, signatures have to be obtained from the instructing employees. That would be an idea to represent this process digitally.

But quality management topics that are currently still on the intranet could also be linked to further reduce administrative effort.

I am now used to it, but when I started working with the LMS, I, as someone with no IT background, found it was not really intuitive at first. There are so many masks and possibilities that I felt a bit exhausted. For each small topic you have to open new buttons and enter new terms.

In the meantime I have developed my routine and found my way around, but in the beginning I would have liked the system to have been more self-explanatory.

SundG Automobil AG is the oldest Mercedes Benz dealer worldwide. Since 2016, the company has been using imc Learning Suite for its 1300 employees.