Thinkific is a great tool to deliver online training to your employees, giving you the ability to create engaging education and onboarding content that gets your team up to speed faster. Read more below about what you should know when using Thinkific for internal training.
In this article:
Your Admin Dashboard and Thinkific Site
Link an Existing Site to Thinkific
Considerations For Employee Training in Thinkific
Overview
In this guide, you'll find a basic outline of all of the 'need-to-know' information you'll require to start using Thinkific to create employee training resources. This includes topics like:
- Setting up your integrations
- Importing users
- Publishing your training products
- Tracking your employee progress
- ...and more!
Whether you're new to Thinkific, or you're looking to expand your existing Thinkific site to include training for your own organization, this article will give you the foundation you'll need to create a central learning resource.
Continue reading for a walkthrough, or use the menu at the top of this article to jump to specific topics.
Getting Started
The links below will provide you with a quick tour of what Thinkific is, how to sign up and get started, and where to go when you need help.
Your Admin Dashboard and Thinkific Site
The first thing you see when you log into your Thinkific site as the Site Owner or Admin is your Admin Dashboard. Think of this page as the control center for your Thinkific site - from here, you can access everything you'll need regarding your account: Site Pages, the Course and Community Builders, Site Settings, Student progress and Orders reports, Integrations and more!
Click on the links below to learn more about your Admin Dashboard.
Link an Existing Site to Thinkific
If you have an existing website or product that your employees already use, you can integrate your existing website with your Thinkific site.
Learn how to link Thinkific with your existing website.
If you're looking to migrate a whole website rather than just linking, the Thinkific Migration Workbook walks you through the process of migrating material from a previous website to Thinkific.
Key Considerations for Employee Training in Thinkific
Before you begin using Thinkific for employee training, there are a few things to consider. We've compiled the following list of commonly asked questions and answers below - click the dropdowns to expand each question to view the answer.
How can I create accounts for my employees?
As a best practice, we recommend setting up an employee's Thinkific account for them, ahead of time. Having your employee's account created beforehand reduces the likelihood of the employee hitting roadblocks in their training on day one.
To create your employee accounts, you can use one of two methods, depending how many accounts you'll be creating:
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Manually Create a New User
Choose this option if you'll only be creating accounts for a small amount of new employees -
Bulk Student Import
This option may be more useful if you plan on creating accounts for a large number of new employees
Additionally, you may find these resources useful:
-
Social Sign In
This feature allows users to sign in with their existing Gmail, LinkedIn or Facebook accounts. -
SSO
This advanced feature allows a user to sign in to an external website and a Thinkific school in one action. Note: this feature requires developer resources.
Will employees need to pay for their courses?
In most cases, employers won't be charging employees for their training or onboarding material. If you plan on offering your training and onboarding to your employees at no cost, products can be set to free, allowing all employees access.
In certain situations, employers may choose to charge a fee in order for an employee to take their training or onboarding. If you plan on charging a fee to access your training and onboarding material, you will need to set up a payment integration to accept payment.
- Thinkific Payments is a built-in payment processor that is a part ofTCommerce's suite of payment processing and selling features. It includes everything you need to accept payments, process refunds, and manage payouts while allowing you to update your banking and business information; all through your Thinkific dashboard.
Once you've set up your payment processor, you'll need to set your Product pricing.
How can I track my employees progress?
Ensuring your employees are able to complete the required training is very important.
Progress reports are available for both your courses, and employees. Analyzing these on a regular basis is recommended - not only to track progress, but also to ensure compliance is met for any time sensitive training, as well as to find any learners who may be struggling and provide with them with the assistance they may need.
Additionally, we highly recommend using Quiz Lessons to test your employees' understanding of your material, and Survey Lessons to gather feedback from your employees in order to improve your products for the next group of learners.
Can I segment my employees so that their enrollments and progress can be handled separately?
Absolutely! This is a perfect use case for our Groups feature.
Using Groups, you can segment your employees by specifics like:
- location (if you have multiple office or store locations)
- department (sales, support, finance, etc.)
- role (individual contributors, managers, executives),
- ...or any combination that makes sense for you!
Once you have your Groups set up, you can also assign Group Analysts, who are able to monitor and report on the progress of the students within that Group using Group Progress Reports.
What if I need multiple sites to deliver custom experiences?
If you're looking to deliver a unique experience to your employees based on their role, department or locale, we recommend setting up multiple sites. This will enable you to easily design your sites and products with different themes, languages, or levels of complexity.
For example: employees you have based in the United States may use an English site, but employees based in an office in Brazil may require a Portuguese site.
Thinkific Plus, our plan for large and quickly growing businesses, comes with 3 separate sites that you can use to start creating unique experiences! Looking to bring your employee training online?
Create Your Training Material
With Thinkific, you can combine a variety of learning products to create a curated experience for your employees. Create a Course from scratch, or use one of our course templates to help you take the guesswork out of curriculum design. Then, create a Community to customize your student experience even more - by providing a dedicated space for employees to discuss training material.
Check out the resources below for more information on how to get your training material set up.
If you have courses and/or communities that you've tailored for specific employees (for example: training courses for your sales team, or software training for your admin team), you can use product bundles to group products by relevance!
Once you've got your products set up, you'll want to make sure you're ready to publish.
New to online course creation? Make sure to check out the Course Creation area of our blog for helpful articles on best practices & ideas.
Student Experience
We believe the best way to build a sustainable learning environment is by truly caring about the success of your employees, and focusing on crafting the best experience possible. To do this, you'll want to focus on three main areas:
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The Thinkific Course Player
This is the course-taking environment itself - the part of your site where students can go to view your curriculum, watch your videos, take quizzes, respond to surveys and more! - The Student/Learner Experience
Preview your course as a Student to get an idea of how the material flows and how the tool work for your employees as they complete their training. -
The Thinkific Community Builder
Building a solid community for learners to engage is a great way to provide your employees with a space for questions, comments, feedback, and to make connections with their fellow trainees. Learn more about the community experience for Students.
Student Support
As the Site Owner, you are the first point of contact for your students. As the subject matter expert, you are the best person to answer your student's questions!
When one of your students has a question, they will see a Support contact option in their top right menu (when logged into their account). This contact option links to the email address you have set under your Site Settings.
Student issues rarely come up but when they do we, you can review our Troubleshooting Guide for Student Issues to narrow down problems.
Check out the Student Experience section of our blog for some fantastic best practice ideas and tips to help create engaging courses your students will love!
Troubleshooting & Tips
We’re here for you, but just in case you’re stuck at 3am, you can always search our Help Center! Here are some popular articles:
General Troubleshooting Resources
Additional Resources
Ready to Launch? Looking for more one on one Support? Need an Expert? We’re here for you!
- Thinkific's Fast Track Training is an online course by Thinkific, where you'll learn how to confidently create and deliver great online courses to your audience on your own terms. Get expert instruction in building a learning experience that you'll be proud to offer!
- Looking for more one on one support to get your courses and site set up? We've put together some packages for those looking for more direct support: Thinkific Onboarding packages
- Do you have years of expertise in your field, and your content ready to go, but looking for someone to help do the work? Hire a freelance marketer, developer, content creator, or even someone to help with set up. Our Experts Marketplace is full of recommended freelancers who are also familiar with Thinkific!