A growing business means new employees and increasing complexity of your business activities. Now your employees need training to learn the various facets of the business such as new products, new services, policies, changes in your industry etc.

So you started searching for different ways to upskill employees and have found something called a learning management system, or LMS. But how do you choose an LMS and where do you start?

This blog will help make your search for an LMS as productive and streamlined as possible. When you’re searching for the right LMS, it is important to compare and assess all features, options and services available to make sure you’re making the right choice.

Before you decide on an LMS, ask yourself these six questions

1. Why does your company need an LMS?

The decision to purchase an LMS should be arrived upon, the basis of how important Learning & Development is for your business. There are subscription costs involved when you purchase the LMS. The time required to implement the LMS must be considered as well.

Some of the reasons to get an LMS are listed below:

Administration: An LMS gives your Learning & Development Manager the option to create and manage courses, classroom sessions, webinars, register and enroll trainees, assign and manage different roles like managers, instructors, etc.

Training on the go: A cloud-based Saas LMS allows your trainees to access self paced eLearning courses from any location as per their convenience.

Complete Training Solution: The LMS can be implemented for training across all departments of your organisation. Depending on the LMS you choose, you can create and train your employees using self-paced online courses, instructor-led training as well as hybrid courses.

Compliance issues: One of the issues that every organization faces is ensuring that employees achieve and maintain compliance. An LMS can be a very handy tool to help you with your compliance related training needs.

Onboarding: Onboarding new employees is a continuous process. The challenge for every organization is to ensure that the knowledge transfer to new employees is done in a seamless manner. The LMS becomes the optimum solution for an organisation to onboard their new employees.

Ongoing skill building: Many Industries require employees to go through recertification of their skills from time to time. An LMS helps make this process easy for the company’s L&D team as they can get reminders and keep a track of recertifications.

2. Which LMS features are important for your company’s training needs?

There are a plethora of LMS platforms available in the market. It is very important to do lots of research while choosing an LMS for your organisation. One must ensure that the LMS features offered meet all your company’s training needs and requirements. The features one should look out for are stated below:

User Experience: One of the most important aspects of picking an LMS is the user experience. This includes the user experience of the Learner as well as Instructor and the Admin. You should look for an LMS that offers an intuitive user interface.

Instructor Led Training and Blended Learning:: Nowadays, Companies are using web conferencing and synchronous training tools like Zoom, GoToWebinar, Google Meet, MS Teams to conduct their ILT programmes. The LMS that your organisation chooses should be deeply integrated with the conferencing tool of your choice, to offer your Trainees the perfect blended learning experience.

Tracking and reporting: These features help you evaluate how well the employees are doing with the courses. It gives your company a detailed analysis of your employees’ learning journey. It helps you evaluate and measure their performance.

SCORM compliance: The LMS you decide to go with has to be SCORM compliant. This is very essential as most of the online training content created these days is in SCORM format and includes animation and gamification. This type of content offers a more interactive learning experience to the trainees.

Assessment and Tests: The assessment and time-barred exams features are vital for assessing how your company’s employees have performed in the courses. Using time-barred exams you can analyse how much information your employees have retained after finishing their course.

Customization and branding: The LMS that your organisation chooses should offer you complete customisation options in terms of branding as per your brand identity and this should include customization of logo, colours, email address, custom domain, favicon, etc.

3. Does the LMS support all major devices?

• It’s very essential that the LMS you choose is compatible with all major browsers and also offers mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. This lets employees access their training on the go anywhere and anytime they want.
• The LMS you choose should be compatible with all major devices
• Mobile apps should provide push notifications to keep Trainees informed and updated about all learning and training developments
• Trainees should be able to access all their course material including assessments and time-barred exams using the mobile apps