Ask any L&D professional what slows them down, and scheduling will almost always be near the top of the list.
Coordinating instructors, resources, locations, rooms, equipment – and doing it all in spreadsheets – can easily eat up hours every week. And as your training programs grow, so do the headaches.
Things get even more complex when the volume of both in-person training sessions (ILT) and virtual instructor-led training (vILT) seminars grows. Whether you’re managing logistics across time zones or juggling last-minute changes, your team can’t afford to make costly mistakes now.
Your team’s goal is clear: deliver high-quality training at scale, without burning out or breaking the system. But here’s the hard truth:
Spreadsheets just weren’t built for scheduling ILT and vILT en masse.
They weren’t designed to handle the dynamic, fast-paced demands of modern training operations.
If your learning strategy is expanding and you’re still relying on Excel to hold it all together, you’re likely losing time, budget, and momentum. So how do you move faster, stay accurate, and scale with confidence?
The Current State of Scheduling for Training Programs: Unveiling Hidden Costs
Course scheduling and training management can often get overlooked in favor of the fun of designing creative learning content. Even on the learning administration side, L&D teams tend to get wrapped up in publishing learning content and communicating with instructors, which means that scheduling sessions and courses becomes an afterthought.
Training success doesn’t just happen in the classroom – it starts with the meticulous work of scheduling and managing operations. If learners don’t get enough notice, you book a venue that’s too small, or your best instructors aren’t available on the dates you choose, things can get messy quickly as you scramble to put things right.
Course Scheduling with Spreadsheets
Training coordinators often find themselves relying on a mix of spreadsheets, databases, and additional resources such as Excel, Google Sheets, and CRMs to manage course and instructor schedules, a practice all too familiar in their line of work. While it can be done, the increase in administrative time leads to an opportunity cost that L&D team members can’t ignore.
Don’t think you’re spending too much time in the sheets?
A McKinsey study on organizational performance revealed that middle managers devote close to 28% of their time on administrative tasks that yield no value to the team or stakeholders. Imagine the possibilities if that time were redirected toward investing in learners or enhancing the training team!
While online calendars, email, and manual spreadsheets may be a popular approach to training management, they are rarely the best solutions. In the world of L&D, relying on spreadsheets to schedule courses and assign instructors can be incredibly time-consuming, particularly for enterprise-level training or blended learning programs.
It’s not uncommon for training coordinators to become proficient Excel users. Many have also explored techniques to track their “total editing time” and view workbook statistics to gauge the extent of their time investment in managing spreadsheets.
The best training management protocols involve automated training scheduling, allowing for an easier way to find and assign the optimal time, instructor, and venue for every session and enabling straightforward future planning.
Ideally, managing learning and development should not be an overly manual process, and software should streamline the course scheduling process, not add more administrative time.
See how Wells Fargo eliminated 633 spreadsheets for scaling ILT & vILT with Training Orchestra
The Importance of Managing Training Programs at Scale: Eliminating Spreadsheet Inefficiencies
Training programs are critical in developing new professional skills and are often attributed to the success of an organization. When measuring the ROI of training, implementing training can produce improvement in skills and job prospects for employees between 50 to 300%, according to various studies.
These programs are here to stay as they’re instrumental in developing and nurturing talent for the long run. From the most fundamental training, such as compliance training programs, to more specialized, goal-oriented initiatives, such as sales enablement training.
Spreadsheets often play a central role in managing learning operations – especially in the early stages of building a training program. They’re familiar, flexible, and can be a helpful way to get organized and start delivering learning initiatives. But as programs grow in size and complexity, spreadsheets quickly become a limiting factor.
At the enterprise level, learning teams invest significant time and effort into administrative tasks just to keep training on track – for their employees, customers, or partners. And that effort doesn’t always scale well.
As the organization grows in headcount and scope of service, L&D teams quickly find that managing training in spreadsheets snowballs into loads of work. The result?
Learning specialists become swamped with manual work – entering data points, cross-referencing instructor schedules, double-checking training course resources, scheduling training sessions, and relaying communications between instructors and L&D stakeholders.
The process of using spreadsheets to schedule training becomes a draining chore for L&D teams. Because so much time is spent on back-office admin work, you lose hours focusing on developing new training programs or strategizing on how to make learning more effective which has been the L&D objective from the start!
Using the Right Learning Technologies for Efficiency and Scale
Training teams are no strangers to adopting multiple technologies and methods to deliver great learning experiences to employees.
Training covers everything from onboarding to compliance to reskilling and upskilling to leadership to soft skills, so it’s clear that the need for high-quality learning extends into every part of an organization.
While the specific learning technology stack will look different for every organization based on its infrastructure and requirements, there are broadly three platform types that will benefit all organizations looking to support a robust blended learning strategy.
1. Learning Experience Platform (LXP)
An LXP is a front-office system in which learners will engage directly. For instance, this could be the company website or a dedicated LXP such as Degreed or Fuse.
The LXP will typically include features and functionality such as:
- Curated content from both internal and third-party sources
- Personalized learning, using algorithms and data analytics to surface the most relevant content for each user
- Social learning, such as forums, public and private collaborative projects, and peer-to-peer learning
2. Learning Management System (LMS)
An LMS is what the training team will use to deliver learning. Typically, this will consist of eLearning courses, digital resources, and multimedia content. Importantly, without extensive customization, the average LMS falls short in handling complex instructor-led training management or scheduling.
On an LMS, you will usually find:
- Course learning material and centralized content repository
- Course administration tools to create and upload formal online training courses
- User management to create users, assign roles, and manage permissions
- Assessments and quizzes to monitor progress and skill development
- Integration with other systems to streamline processes and share data
3. Training Management System (TMS): Spreadsheet-Free Scheduling
The TMS or Training Management System helps organizations manage and streamline their training operations, focusing specifically on ILT, vILT, and hybrid training.
A TMS provides training teams with an easy way to centralize, organize, and schedule live training events without having to use calendars, spreadsheets and other manual processes.
Core features of a TMS like Training Orchestra include:
- Scheduling and resource management to identify the best time, instructor, venue, and resources for each training session
- Trainer skills catalog for assigning the best available
- Cost tracking tools to help avoid training budget mistakes
- Instructor engagement portal for communicating and sharing documents with trainers
- Integration with other systems, including the LMS, for easy learner enrollment
Streamlining ILT Management: From Spreadsheets to Training Orchestra
Who would have ever known that a spreadsheet could reveal a lot about how we schedule and manage corporate training programs!
Between training providers and corporate training departments, rolling out L&D programs for the sake of organizational success is paramount. This means, training teams, like their organizations, must be fast, efficient, and effective when it comes to delivering learning and increasing their training ROI.
To really see the value of delivering training at scale, L&D teams must move away from spreadsheet for ILT management and integrate a training management system (TMS) to serve as the core of their training operations.
That’s where the Training Orchestra comes in.
Our market-leading TMS helps organizations worldwide add efficiency to their training administration processes by making it easier to plan, schedule, and coordinate enterprise-scale ILT programs (live online or in-person) and blended learning programs without the use of calendars, spreadsheets, or any other software.
If this sounds like what you need, we’d love to show you around!
Schedule your demo and we’ll show you how Training Orchestra can help you move from spreadsheets to simplicity in seconds!
