Learning Management Systems and their impact on your business
When it comes to learning tools, for many organizations, their learning management system is essential.
Just over three-quarters of US-based companies make use of a learning management system (LMS), with just under three-quarters of them feeling they provide a competitive advantage.
What is a Learning Management System?
First, let’s define what a learning management system is and, for this, we’ll look to our good friend Wikipedia:
“A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs.”
This sounds like it’s in the realm of the education space, doesn’t it?
Well, that is the case. K-12 schools make use of learning management systems for their learning environment. During my time at university, some LMSs I used frequently included the Moodle LMS and Blackboard LMS.
However, this article will not be focused on LMSs for educational institutions and higher education—we’ll be looking at the role of the LMS in regards to developing employees and how it can be used for employee training with a digital learning approach.
We’ll also look at how to use an LMS for content management and course management.
The role of a Learning Management System in the workplace
What are some of the roles a learning management system can play in the workplace?
- Onboarding new employees
- Employee training and development
- As a repository for company knowledge on-demand.
Organizations utilize LMSs differently. Some will use it more as a repository. Others will use it to help new employees get up to speed. An LMS can also be utilized for JIT (just in time) training for when the job demands it.
LMSs can also help create a more personalized learning experience for employees. Depending on what role they have in the organization (software developer, sales, legal), an employee can easily find the training content they need that focuses on their role.
If they are interested in other areas of the organization, they can make use of the LMS to learn more about other roles and opportunities.
Depending on your organization, compliance with government regulations may be required. An LMS can serve as a way to keep track and ensure that employees and the organization have the proper training and certifications required in order to meet compliance.
The benefits of using a Learning Management System
The reason that so many organizations use an LMS, of course, is because of the benefits they can provide to your organization.
Cost savings
An LMS allows employees to learn at their own pace. With an e-learning approach, employees can go through interactive modules at their own leisure at any time. Compare that to bringing everyone in to train in a webinar, or having to fly people in to train face-to-face.
Measurable results
It can be hard to measure how much team members really gain from learning materials. An online learning approach using an LMS makes it far easier to track what employees have accessed from your online courses with plenty of metrics offered.
Using this data can help better design the training materials that achieve higher completion and retention rates. This data can also be used to identify shortcomings in employee training (such as lower retention and completion rates) and how to work on those shortcomings.
Career development
One of the key ways to ensure employee retention is to allow ample growth opportunities and empower employees to take charge of their own development.
By offering online training that's personalized to each employee, team members are better placed to learn skills to help them move up (or horizontally) within your organization and set out a clear path for their development. This will help improve employee engagement and retention.
Ease of scaling
An LMS makes updating learning content easy in one central place. Content can easily be added or tweaked at any time in one central location.
More consistency and better quality
It’s easy for important knowledge to end up in email purgatory, notes scattered about the office, or located only in the head of certain employees.
An LMS helps keep that knowledge available to everyone instead of being buried away.
The best way to ensure that knowledge or important training isn’t lost is to choose an LMS that allows for collaborative learning. This allows anyone from the organization to update the LMS to help share knowledge with the rest of the organization or can update training materials as new information is acquired.
While a team or individual within the organization will still remain in charge of the LMS, allowing for collaborative learning will help fill in those gaps that may have been missed.
Tags: Business, Careers & Training, Internet
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