Six Key Capabilities Of A Modern Learning Management System

What is a learning management system, or “LMS”?

An LMS handles your delivery and tracking of all the learning needs of your business.

There are a number of reasons why you would want to use an LMS.

The main purpose is to deliver and track learning and eLearning initiatives in one place.

What you need from an LMS will depend on your business’s needs.

Ultimately it should help your learning & development staff to simplify their processes and develop their training to suit all different types of learners.

Why Should You Use An LMS?

In business, you’ll know how difficult it can be to have in place an effective learning and development function. Using an LMS doesn’t have to break a bank and the value you gain from it usually makes it well worthwhile.

What are the consequences of not having adequate training and learning opportunities available?

Your employees will fail to take you up on the courses you’re providing which could ultimately mean huge learning gaps across the organization.

Using an LMS is a great use of technology in improving your L&D efforts.

It is designed to manage the development, tracking, and delivery of your learning content.

The ultimate aim is to improve both workforce skills and productivity without a hefty price tag. Instead, it allows you to monitor and easily keep track of your employees’ learning in one place.

Six Features You Should Look For In An LMS

1. Delivery of online learning

This is one of the main capabilities you should expect to get from your LMS.

The system needs to be able to deliver online learning to your employees. This is learning that is job-specific and fundamental to doing their role effectively.

You can also ask employees what training they want and use the system to provide this as well wherever possible.

The LMS should be customizable to you and your business in both the creation and delivery of your online learning.

2. Easy to use

If you want to get your employees on board with using the LMS, ease of use has to be one of your main priorities when choosing a provider.

Where the system is clunky, hard to use, and just downright unhelpful — you can guarantee people won’t use it!

The system needs to work from the outset; especially if this is the first time you’re trying to introduce the LMS to your team. You need your employees to like and trust the system from the beginning.

If you, or your team, encounters any snags or issues when using the system, you should encourage them to let you know so that you can report this back to your provider and get it resolved.

Overall…the experience should be one that is easy to navigate with a clean and user-friendly interface.

3. Tools for carrying out assessments

How do you know your courses and eLearning is working without assessments to test the knowledge of the user?

Your LMS must incorporate assessments as part of the eLearning process.

The benefits of this are:

• Providing employees with feedback on their assessment, identifying strengths and areas for improvement
• Data and analytics to show how well your team performed on a particular assessment. This will give you points you can use in improving the course and test user comprehension. I.e. if the assessment had a really low pass rate, was it too difficult or did it contain irrelevant questions?

When looking for an LMS provider, you should choose one that has the capabilities of incorporating different forms of assessments to both give you a variety of data and also to account for different learning styles.

4. Progress tracking and reporting

Reporting and analytics help you to properly gauge how effective your LMS is and how well it is working.

It is imperative that you measure the actions of your employees when they are inside the system.

For example:

• How effective are your courses in teaching the relevant topic?
• Are there pain-points users are finding in the courses that need to be addressed?

You should have the option to put this information into a report which will help your L&D staff identify any areas of improvement necessary and also to see what’s going well, and the course people are enjoying.

When the courses you have to roll out are important for compliance purposes, the reporting system is incredibly important.

5. Good technical support

Technical issues happen with even the best systems in the world.

When you come across a technical issue with your LMS provider, it’s important that you can reach out to someone who can help you to resolve the problem quickly and easily.

The LMS provider should offer you a variety of ways to contact their technical support team. Live chat, email and telephone are all common options the majority of systems now provide.

6. Cloud-based

The future is in the cloud.

Businesses are putting less stock into software-based solutions and are more so looking for cloud-based options.

Why?

Cloud-based options provide ease and accessibility, especially in a world of remote working.

Employees can log-in at any time and from anywhere.

With a cloud-based LMS, you’ll receive automatic updates whenever they are available and ongoing support from your LMS provider.

How Can We Help You?

As a cloud-based LMS provider, we can help you with the needs of your business. For on-boarding new employees, our system is a great tool to help you with your training needs.

With our system, you get the following capabilities:

• The ability to create online and on-site instructor led trainings which give employee certification when passed
• Plan both mandatory and optional trainin
• Multi-level administration features allows you to give different access and rights to individual members of the team
• Manage all of your complex assessments and certification renewals, including putting together tests, providing reports and analytic
• Automate your processes
• Track employee progress
• Benefit from multiple performance options including 360-degree feedback, performance reviews, surveys etc.

Why Does Your Business Need An LMS?

An LMS is an important investment for your business and one that will continue to provide you with a return on investment as your business grows.

The learning management system is an efficient way to run your online learning program.

It automates processes such as pulling together reports, data, and analytics that would otherwise have taken some serious manpower to prepare.

The best thing about an LMS is that it helps to simplify an important aspect of any business for both you as a business owner, your L&D team and employees.

If you are considering an LMS and would like some more information about how things work, get in touch and we’d be happy to talk through our services with you and meet your needs.