Thinkific is a great tool to deliver training for your employees, giving you the ability to create engaging education and onboarding content that gets your team up to speed faster. There are some additional considerations when using Thinkific for internal training that may change how you get started.
In this article:
Your Admin Dashboard & Thinkific Site
Setting Up Your Thinkific Site
Considerations For Employee Training in Thinkific
The Course Player & Student Experience
Overview
This guide covers everything you need to get started using Thinkific for training your employees. Setting up your integrations, importing users, publishing your training courses and tracking your employee progress! This is a great article for beginners to Thinkific, as well as those looking to expand their existing usage of Thinkific to their own organizations.
First Things First
The links below will introduce (or re-introduce!) you to some important elements of your Thinkific account and the resources available to you. We got your back!
Your Admin Dashboard & Thinkific Site
The first thing you see when you log into your Thinkific site is your Admin Dashboard. You can think of this as the control center for your Thinkific site, and it’s where you can access everything - Site Builder, the Course Builder, Site Sittings, Student progress, Orders reports, Integrations and more! Click on the links to learn more about your Admin Dashboard:
Access Your Site and General Navigation
Admin Dashboard - A Closer Look
Setting Up Your Thinkific Site
Do you have an existing website or product that your employees already use? No problem! You can integrate your existing website with your Thinkific site. Learn more here: How to Link Thinkific with Your Existing Website.
If you're building a brand new site, Thinkific also makes it easy for you to create a complete, stand-alone website from which to deliver your online courses. Check out how to start building your site and courses here: Getting Started with Thinkific
Key Considerations For Employee Training in Thinkific
When using Thinkific for employee training, there are a handful of things to take into account when setting up your site. It's recommended you ask yourself the following questions so that you or your employees don't hit roadblocks getting started.
How can I create accounts for my employees?
There are a number of ways you can have accounts for your employees created within Thinkific. As a best practice, we generally recommend setting up an employee's Thinkific account for them. Your new employee is already probably nervous and excited, so having their account ready to go for them on their first day is one less thing they have to worry about!
Manually Create a New User - useful when creating accounts for a handful of new employees.
Bulk Student Import - more useful when creating accounts for a larger number of new employees.
Social Sign In - a feature that allows users to sign in with their existing Gmail, LinkedIn or Facebook accounts.
SSO - an advanced feature that allows a user to sign into an external website and a Thinkific school in one action. Requires developer resources!
Will employees need to pay for their courses?
In nearly all cases, employers will not charge their employees for their training or onboarding courses. This means that courses can be set to free, allowing for easy access to all employees. In certain cases, employers may choose to charge a fee in order for an employee to take a course. In that case, the following articles will help with setting up payment integrations and collecting payment.
How can I track my employees progress?
Ensuring that your employees are able to complete the training is very important. Progress reports for your courses and employees can be analyzed to track their progress to ensure compliance for any time sensitive training, as well as find any students who may be struggling to complete the course so that you can provide with them with any extra assistance they may need. In addition, we highly recommend using Quiz lessons to test your employees' understanding of concepts, and Survey lessons to gather any feedback from your employees in order to improve your courses 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 things like location (if you have multiple office or store locations), by department (sales, support, finance, etc.), by 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!
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 courses 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!
Create Your Courses
That’s why you’re here! With Thinkific you can build a course from scratch or use one of our course templates to help you take the guesswork out of curriculum design. Then you can start adding your lessons, learning supports, and customize your student experience.
The Thinkific Course Builder (An Overview)
Upload and Manage Your Video Library
Creating Draft Content for Your Course
If you have courses that are designed for specific teams - for example, training courses for your sales team or software training for your admin team - you can use course bundles to give access to courses that are most relevant to your employees!
New to online course creation? Make sure to check out the Course Creation area of our blog for helpful articles on best practices & ideas.
The Course Player & 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 ways to craft the best experience possible. In this section we’ll provide some insight on both the student experience and the Course Player. The Course Player 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!
Preview Your Course as a Student
Student Support
As the Site Owner, you are responsible as the first point of contact for your students. You are the best person to answer your student's questions as the subject matter expert!
If one of your students has a question they can't find the answer to, they will see a Support contact option in the top right menu when logged into their account that 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.
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 for general troubleshooting:
System requirements and Support Browsers
Why can't I login to my Thinkific site?
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!
When you're nearly ready to launch your course, check out our Perfect Launch Workbook! It’s a guide meant to help you stay organized and on task so your course launch goes smoothly and without a hitch: Perfect Launch Workbook
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!