HRTech Interview with Ramesh Ramani, President & CEO, ExpertusONE

ExpertusONE

ExpertusONE is the best choice for employee training. Ramesh Ramani highlights how digital learning can benefit internal teams, customer relationships, sales outcomes, and brand partnerships and keep people engaged

1. Could you tell us more about your role at ExpertusONE?
In my role as CEO and President of ExpertusONE, I focus on strategic initiatives and provide direction, vision, and synergy between different departments within the company. Every day, I guide the direction of the company, give input on the development of our products and services, and ensure that the company is aligned on goals and objectives.

2. How was the initial phase of setting up ExpertusONE? What does a regular day at work look like now?
My co-founder, Mohana Radhakrishnan, and I began ExpertusONE more than 20 years ago as a consulting company that guided industry-leading companies through the complexities of corporate learning. We worked with companies like Cisco, Mueller to solve issues related to learning and development.

In 2010, about ten years after our founding, we noticed a shift in learning needs that legacy platform—the ones my co-founder and I had spent our careers working with up to that point—could not address. Learners needed accessible and usable tools, managers and leaders needed flexibility in the design and development of the LMS, and everyone needed more support than what was available at the time. With decades of experience in the learning and development sector, my co-founder and I joined forces with a skilled technical team to develop our own LMS platform.

When we were engineering the ExpertusONE platform, much of our time was spent determining its design for solving critical business challenges. But, as with any technological product, we are always redeveloping and improving our platform. We constantly reassess the effectiveness of our LMS and what we need to do to improve our users’ experiences. As a result, my work today is less focused on the initial development of the tool and more focused on its improvement. I spend time strategizing for the brand, assessing the market, and understanding learners’ needs so that we can provide the best possible solution, purpose-built for their needs.

3. What are the salient features setting you apart from your competitors?
The ExpertusONE platform is unique because it is highly flexible and can cater to a variety of learner and manager needs. For example, our platform has extensible apps that work with other commonly used workplace platforms like Slack, Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams. These apps are critically important for a hybrid workforce that may need to access training resources while on the go or while they have limited access to applications. They also improve the user experience by reducing friction and improve completion rates because they are easy to access from the systems used in the employees’ everyday workflow.
The ExpertusONE LMS has a modular design that makes it easy for companies to adjust and alter to their needs. This is especially beneficial when companies leverage customer training as part of their business strategy but want to ensure that their branding guidelines are translated, even on the platform. Our award-winning customer support team is also available for 24/7 guidance, which is a feature very few platforms offer. ExpertusONE is also competitively priced in comparison to other leading LMS brands to fit budgets for companies of various scale.

One of the biggest concerns that prospective clients voice is the time it takes to implement new technology. Very few companies can afford to have weeks or months of downtime. We took this into account when developing ExpertusONE, and we designed the platform so that companies can get the system up and running quickly. As an example, the U.S. Government Publishing Office, one of our customers, came to us with a need to implement a modern Learning Management System to train their new hybrid workforce. GPO was the first federal agency to implement a comprehensive, interactive cloud-based 100% telework and remote work policy. As a result of our successful partnership, the office was able to train more than 250 leaders along with staff across diverse roles on compliance-related topics with greater efficiency and effectiveness, and they were also able to adhere to rigorous compliance requirements set forth by the Office of Personnel Management. The successful collaboration between GPO and ExpertusONE is leading the way for how other federal agencies can modernize to meet the future of work.

One critical differentiator we’ve focused on in the last year is our interactive content features, especially as they relate to employee engagement. In the Age of Great Resignation, many companies are rethinking how they relate to employees, the resources they provide for teams, and how they can make room for upskilling and reskilling. Features like our proprietary Interaction Studio (which makes it easy for content creators to upload quizzes, polls, videos, audio content, and more to a course), embedded video conferencing, and gamification, facilitate engagement among employees and can boost overall morale and productivity.

4. Which are the major industries you cater to?
The ExpertusONE platform was designed for all industries, not just a specific sector of learning and development. However, many of our tools meet the needs of highly regulated industries
For example, our newly launched ONE-Profile card helps highly skilled workers share their certifications and licenses when on the go. It’s useful for managers, too, as a skills verification tool. While the QR-code design makes it multifunctional and applicable to many industries, the ONE-Profile card is especially useful in fields that require very specific licenses and credentials, like healthcare or manufacturing. Demonstrating certifications and current licenses is essential for healthcare professionals, especially those who may travel for work, or who work from multiple job sites. This tool streamlines that process and makes it easy for workers to show proof of their skills and for managers to verify skills for regulating bodies.

Other LMS platforms may not offer the compliance training tools that many industries require, like e-signature verification, CEUs, or compliance date management. ExpertusONE offers all these features to ensure that companies in industries like healthcare can adhere to rigorous compliance regulations without the fear of something falling through the cracks.

5. Why would you emphasize choosing ExpertusONE LMS for employee training, learning, and development?
ExpertusONE is the best choice for employee training because it addresses the most complex and varied training and development goals and challenges that companies are facing. In the last two years, we’ve seen how rapidly company and employee needs can change. Legacy training platforms have not been able to support these changing goals, or the need for more nimble and adaptable features like mobile functionality or AI-driven experiences.

6. Can you elaborate on the services that ExpertusONE offers?
ExpertusONE is a digital LMS platform that enables companies to train, equip, and develop their employees, customers, partners, and sales teams.
The ExpertusONE platform has a modular design that enables companies to customize the functionality of the platform and adapt to their own branding needs, and the platform has multiple features that can help ease the burden of managing a large course library.

Employees also get a personalized training experience when their company uses ExpertusONE because our platform leverages AI and machine learning to provide each employee with a set of personalized course recommendations based on their needs, interests, and goals.

Companies trust ExpertusONE as a LMS partner because it is the best, most effective overall solution for large and small companies across industries. With a variety of features that solve both the most universal and unique challenges faced across sectors, the purpose-built platform brings the best features to bear for the modern world including ease-of-use, intuitive and elegant functionality, fast implementation and adaptable design at a competitive price point.

7. What are the obstacles to training adoption that you typically see among companies?
The biggest obstacle to training adoption is training technology. Too many companies—large, industry-leading companies with dedicated budgets for training—stick with legacy LMS platforms that aren’t designed to fit the needs of modern learners. It’s a huge hindrance to training adoption because learners struggle to complete training courses. This problem was magnified by the pandemic because employee needs changed rapidly. Now, companies are managing hybrid or remote teams and trying to figure out which tools are effective in this new era of work.

Most of these companies stick with outdated training tools because they can’t afford downtime. They don’t want weeks or months of time spent on implementation, even if the software is better.
Another obstacle to training adoption is the overall training strategy. Many companies are still implementing the training strategies they developed prior to the pandemic when our priorities at work were different.
In this new era of work, employees are more thoughtful and strategic with their time—and they expect their employers to be thoughtful and strategic also. This means that companies can’t assign a large set of training courses without good reason (that reason being that the courses are beneficial to the employee’s individual learning needs). Similarly, if companies are using the same training platforms they’ve used for decades, the chances are high that the courses are not engaging or interactive enough. Learners have come to expect better digital experiences, and they want the platforms that they use to cater to their needs.

8. What are some of the benefits that digital learning could have in the workplace?
Digital learning can benefit internal teams, customer relationships, sales outcomes, and brand partnerships.

A digital learning strategy is multifunctional and can keep people engaged even in a hybrid or remote work environment.

For employees, digital training offers them the ability to keep up with their skills and certifications on their own schedule and in a variety of locations. It reduces the burden of required training because it is not limited to a specific time, location, or style of learning. For example, one learner could take a compliance course at home, in small increments of time, over a few days, from their phone, while another learner could take the same course in an office on their computer over a few hours in a single day.

Digital learning also boosts engagement because it gives team members a chance to connect and even compete among each other (especially when gamification tools are employed) in the workplace. Companies can also use digital learning tools to engage with customers by providing essential courses or bonus courses that improve the customer’s experience of a product or service.

9. Can you tell us about your team?
Our internal team is made up of engineering and solutions-oriented individuals who understand the complexities of the digital learning experience. We are constantly working together to create better employee experiences, improve training, and bring forth the future of learning and development. We have teams in the United States and in India, and we work to create a collaborative environment. We also work with global customers and partners to improve learners’ experiences across industries. Our goal is to form long-term, trusting partnerships with our customers.

10. What is the message you want to spread with this interview?
The most important message that I think company leaders and innovators should know is that it’s time for a new era of training. It’s not only time for a new way of looking at training but also for new training technology. Companies must replace their legacy training systems if they want to attract, train, and retain the workforce of the future. Employees are looking for better workplace experiences, and if companies do not invest in new training models, they will miss out on the share of top talent. Digital transformation is already here, and leading companies (across industries) can’t afford to delay digital adoption any further. A digital LMS platform is an essential component of the modern employee experience.

Are you ready to invest in training and build a stronger workforce? If so, reach out to us—we would be thrilled to help you.

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Ramesh Ramani President & CEO, ExpertusONE

Ramesh brings his business expertise to the ExpertusONE team by providing direction, vision, and synergy between different components of the company. Dedicating 20-plus years to the ExpertusONE mission, Ramesh guides the development of products and services, organizational structure, internal processes, and overarching principles that enable the company’s success. He is currently championing the mission to bring distributed learning to employees, disrupt traditional training practices, and provide digital tools that transform how businesses think about learning.

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