Feature Trak - Level Up Learning with Catalogs

Do you have an e-learning library at your disposal? As you make new hires, promote employees, and enrich your workforce, having training materials ready helps make the transition smooth! 

Building an e-learning library doesn’t have to be challenging, but getting everything together can take time and effort. Creating E-Learning catalogs within Learn, with like-topics grouped, helps your team utilize your coursework in new ways. 


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What is a Catalog?

A catalog is an e-learning library for your team.  They allow you to host a selection of courses that your trainees - either internal or external - can self-enroll in, making it easy for them to level up their training on their schedule.

Catalogs can reduce the admin task of inviting and enrolling learners in the courses.  Admins can make the catalogs available to the trainees from inside the dashboard or distribute the catalog URL to trainees. 

Creating a Catalog

From the left navigation panel, click on Catalogs.  Then click on  Create Catalog in the upper right corner to get started.
A fly-over window will appear, displaying the options for creating your new catalog.  Enter the details, such as the Catalog Name, Catalog Description, and select the Courses you want to include.  You can also decide if you want this available on the Trainee Dashboard so trainees can self-enroll.  You can further designate what specific groups can self-enroll, too.
Click on the orange Add Courses button to add established courses to your catalog.

Sharing Catalogs

Catalogs provide an easy way to group all your course offerings onto one page. Instead of inviting trainees to specific courses, catalogs allow the trainee to enroll in the items that interest them. Admins can either make the catalog available to trainees from inside their trainee dashboard or distribute the URL to trainees, allowing them to sign up from the external catalog page.

Internal Employee Training

Internal employee training is often a mix of mandatory training and optional courses.  Catalogs are an excellent option for optional courses you'd like your trainees to view and self-enroll in.  You can share a direct link to the catalog - via email or on an intranet - and allow trainees to self-enroll via their Trainee Dashboard.

Access these options by selecting the catalog, clicking Edit, then scrolling to Public Catalog Page Access.  This is where you can grab the URL to share or embed the catalog and email the link.  In the screenshot below, only existing trainees in your account can enroll in the courses via the catalog page.

When trainees go to their dashboard, they will see a toggle at the top to view the Course Catalog.  Once here, they can scroll through or search for the available catalogs.

Once they find the catalog they'd like to explore, they can click on it to view all available courses.

You can also share the URL with your trainees, as you do with the public catalog.  Email it to your trainees or embed it into your intranet for easy access!

External Customer Training

Catalogs simplify organizing your external training to share with your customers or clients.  Organizing your courses into catalogs allows trainees to browse and pick what they'd like to take on an "as needed" basis.  You can share the URL with your customers, and they can bookmark it - and any updates to the modules, courses, or catalogs will automatically go through. 

Access these options by selecting the catalog, clicking Edit, then scrolling to Public Catalog Page Access.  This is where you can grab the URL to share or embed the catalog and email the link.  With public URLs, you can also share the catalog directly with your social network!

By setting the option to Public, anyone with a link can register and take this course.  They will self-enroll as a trainee into your account.

Here is an example of what a catalog page looks like.  It displays the courses available, a brief description, and the trainer.

Upskilling Your Employees with E-Learning

So let’s talk about upskilling, a big buzzword in HR - it teaches employees new skills and tactics to help them succeed.  It promotes continuous learning and improvement of existing employees rather than hiring new ones. Upskilling focuses on training, mentoring, and improving current employee skill sets to either advance within the company (allowing for lower-level hires) or fill in the gaps within a department.

At Trakstar, we talk about leveling up your employees - that's what upskilling is!  And there are so many benefits to investing time and learning resources in your current team.  


By building these internal training resources via catalogs - and involving your employees in the process - you can "download" that organizational knowledge and easily share it amongst teams. 

The current workforce is transforming the traditional single-skilled personnel into multi-skilled employees who can multi-task and take on many responsibilities under one job title.  And this can only be possible through new disruptive learning models and continued employee education.

Focusing learning within Trakstar Learn has many benefits, such as:

  • Savings in training costs, including travel expenses & time
  • Flexibility - trainees can take courses whenever they want and don't have to take time away from work to attend
  • Unified training for all - keeps the resource inside the organization, i.e., the training courses you create
  • Long-term organizational success is linked to embracing a learning culture

Creating & Sourcing e-Learning Content

We've gone over how to create these catalogs - and why they are crucial in creating a unified and engaged workforce.  But where can you get the content to create these learning resources?

Learn Account: The first place to look is your own Learn account!  What modules and courses do you already have?  Work with your learning and development team or assign this to a team member as a particular project.  A full audit of the current coursework can allow you to build out these catalogs with existing resources. After looking through your existing resources, it is time to fill in the gaps and see what additional courses you'd like to create.  You can get creative with making this content - there is a ton of information, so use it!

Your Employees: Your employees are likely to be subject matter experts in various topics.  Schedule time during a team meeting or all hands for them to do a knowledge share - then record this and upload it into Learn as its course.
Google Scholar: Look through the Google Scholar search engine - this unique search engine only pulls up scholarly articles.  These resources are great ways to build webinars or internal course content.  Find one relevant to the course you want to create, and then transform it into a presentation - add some audio recording, and you have a course ready to go.

Ready To Go Content; Companies like HSI (formerly eJ4, a Learn Partner) provide you with plug-and-play content that fits any organization. Over 2,000 short, on-demand videos with over 40 content categories, including Business Skills, Workplace Compliance, and Software Skills. These courses are regularly reviewed and updated to ensure compliance.   If you are interested in setting this up, you can reach out to us in support at learn@trakstar.com.

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