Centrical in New York (formerly GamEffective) invites businesses to drive employee experience and growth using real-time performance management, personalized microlearning, and advanced gamification, with their eponymous technology platform.
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Skillsoft Leadership Development Program
Score 7.7 out of 10
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Skillsoft offers their Leadership Development Program, with a number of course offerings featuring scenarios and model behavior, reflection exercises and other curricula to train learning or first-time managers.
It is appropriate and I am sure it will meet your organization's needs if you are looking for an end to end Learning Management System, where you can design and upload content for your different programs. Centrical is also highly recommended if you are looking to gamify programs. Another strong point is performance management as it allows for real-time KPI information and analysis and for some precision on-demand learning. It does not have a plug and play course catalog, so it isn't a solution if you are looking for a catalog of courses for employee development.
They have a large library - make sure you clearly study the library offerings and choose the courses that are best for you as you will never be able to use all of them. Make sure you survey your user base before purchasing the licensing of the library courses so the courses are 'marked' with an employee in mind to keep costs minimized. Only purchase the Books 24x7 if you have a large IT department - otherwise you might want to lease a smaller content portion. Their Leadership Development, Project Management, business series and critical thinking and technical products are exceptional.
Covers a wide-breadth of topics ranging from desktop / office skills to communications skills to leadership development
Offers knowledge portals (Knowledge Centers) around specific topic areas such as Management Development, Six Sigma, Professional Foundations, Sales, etc - that aggregate content from the large Skillsoft resources and present it in a way that is both meaningful and relevant to the learners. Plus, they have editors update the featured topic each month.
Include a wide variety of learning media such as eLearning courses, books, book summaries and videos.
The platform does have room to improve their response time for assistance. Depending on the issue an internal "help team may be required"
They removed what was called "knowledge centers" which could be summed up as an accumulation of books, courses, exams, practice exams, articles and basically any asset within the platform surrounded by a particular subject. This was a great benefit to some of our customer. It was a one-stop-shop but now you would need to search independently for all of those assets.
Because the platforms library can be customized its a bit of a struggle to have certain assets changed or modified within Skillsoft. You basically are on their time when it comes to updates or any major changes you as a customer would like to make.
I would recommend to renew as this is part of our employee development goals and we make a strong commitment to develop employees' people skills. I think SkillSoft has a very innovative approach to develop people's interpersonal skills other than traditional classroom learning.
Overall, this is a great product, with many flexible and value-add characteristics. The variety of flavors it offers to configure learning and performance management solutions from scratch, together with a strong team behind it and the appropriate support channels, make this an ideal option for most organizations.
The integration between the main Skillsoft portal and Books24x7 could use improvement. Most users don't realize there is actually a separate books portal because the link to it is not that visible. Yet, once they discover it, they realize that the books portal is actually easier to use to search for books, ebook summaries, and videos.
There is a dedicated support team available and a support platform 24/7. Tickets are worked on quickly and a sense of urgency is understood by the provider. Feedback is taken into consideration, and one thing that makes a huge difference for me is the fact that there is a product development team that constantly reaches out and enhances the product to adapt to clients' needs.
Just that it takes a village. It cannot be done alone. Everyone needs to know what you are doing and what their role is in the implementation. Tightly managing the project management schedule and resources is important in ensuring that everything gets done on time, and with quality. Education is KEY
We selected Centrical especially because of the ease to configure and how you may integrate compelling narratives into your programs. It makes a big difference to add personality to it. You may use the "out of box" options, but also you can configure your own based on your needs. This user-friendly platform is also guaranteed to be secure and compliant to PCI standards, which makes a huge difference.
We chose SkillSoft for the overall ease of use for both our users and our administrators and have a great value proposition. We have continued our contracts for the same reasons and the relationship we have built with our Learning Consultant and Account Representative.
