Why is the ‘Learning Management System’ or an ‘LMS’ a trending buzzword in Learning & Development (L&D) circles in enterprises worldwide? Has employee skilling/ training gained its due footing amid KPI targets? This blog will help you answer these questions and find the key benefits of an LMS in elevating workforce training.

Over the past decade, businesses have been in a constant flux to gain the desired competitive advantage on the account of rising complexity and uncertainty within the corporate landscape, and so are the learning and training challenges that business agility usually calls for. The present digital, information-based economy has a reduced shelf-life for knowledge, consequently placing a premium on reskilling /upskilling to sustain future growth. As a result, the importance of learning tools and platforms to manage organization wide Learning and Development (L&D) activities is also rising.

An LMS is not only a web-based application that creates, imparts and manages workforce training, but also is an integral part of your organization’s L&D best practices. The primary responsibility of L&D departments is to build a learning strategy that is based on the company’s business goals. This learning strategy is meant to support the professional development of employees and build capabilities across the company. An LMS is the best possible solution to successfully and uniformly execute this strategy.

Here are eight compelling reasons you need an LMS:

  1. Reduces Training Time and Expenses

Skilled employees are necessary for any business to sustain a balanced growth. Their job performance and satisfaction level depend a lot on the available opportunities to maintain or enhance their relevant skills .This requires a well-planned and ongoing investment in L&D. Successful execution of these L&D initiatives on time and on budget is critical to garner and sustain support from business leaders. Leveraging an LMS for this purpose can noticeably reduce the training expenses and time as compared to other available methods. An LMS helps save the cost of hiring an instructor, renting a venue, travelling and lodging, printing the training material and more. The loss of business hours due to in-person training is greatly reduced by allowing access to online learning any-time, any-where and from any device.

  • Centralizes Knowledge Pool

Businesses drive innovation and growth based on their intellectual capital. An LMS provides a centralized pool of learning resources that is up-to-date, consistent and accessible across the company. Such a knowledge repository provides uniform learning opportunities for the geographically distributed workforce. An LMS features tools to easily create, upload, assign and appraise the content of the repository.

  • Engages Employees

Today, the L&D focus has shifted from providing employee training as a discipline to giving an entire learning experience in order to drive learner engagement. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) empowered LMSes of today provide that effectively. Using the training patterns and course preferences of a learner, it can identify and recommend best fit training programs out of the centralized knowledge pool. Enriched learner choice is motivating and engaging for the workforce and they are more likely to stick to, and flourish with, LMS supported learning. Augmented employee skills hence attained, are one of the important factors in increasing job satisfaction, and subsequently, the bottom line.

  • Provides Social Learning

An LMS lets you leverage the power of social learning, where you can include online forums, live chat, news feed, and more, that will undoubtedly be useful in learning from and with your peers and colleagues. Social Learning helps employees develop, support and share significant insights in an informal set-up. Shared learning can also prove to be an important tool to generate preferred knowledge resources, obtain learners’ response and use this information to increase the employee experience.

  • Delivers Blended Learning

An LMS gives you the unique facility of providing employee training in multiple formats like Instructor-led Training (ILT), e-learning (bespoke and online content libraries), video-based learning, mobile learning, social learning, and virtual classrooms among others. This functionality provides a variety of learning options ranging from bite-sized microlearning to hours-long intensive training. In addition, Blended Learning provides benefits of scaling audiences, economizing training budgets and expanding the reach.

  • Facilitates Business Intelligence

Learning analytics feature of an LMS upholds huge significance in improving employees’ learning experience by capturing and preserving details related to their training. An LMS provides the ability to easily track their progress and generate performance reports on an overall or individual basis. L&D can then easily track learning progress, knowledge gains, improvement areas and more to take further call to action.

  • Enables Extended Enterprise Training

With an LMS, businesses can leverage learning as a strategic tool to drive sales, brand loyalty, and customer satisfaction especially if a large section of the revenue derives from their channel partners. The LMS provides relevant and engaging training material, evaluation and modification of channel partner practices. Better trained and empowered channel partners can reach their peak performance to enhance business growth.

  • Simplifies Compliance Training

An LMS has built-in capability to automate administrative, deployment and tracking functions which can be utilized to impart mandatory compliance training without any overhead of time or workload. This ensures that the business is running in accordance with the industry regulations. Simplification of compliance training has played a major role in expanding the LMS industry worldwide.

These are some of the numerous benefits that businesses worldwide are deriving by utilizing an LMS. Today, a targeted learning approach is vital in shaping an individual’s knowledge and skills, which often results in an improved ownership in their roles. An LMS addresses the necessity of a flexible, personalized and relevant training platform to bridge the gap between learning and performance. Modern cloud-based LMSes are equipped with proven-effective functionalities, including engaging UI/UX, agile training management, efficient data storage, flexibility of scale, built-in Intelligence, responsive design, useful analytics, mobile apps, and the list will continue to grow with the speed of innovation in technology.

However, even with the best learning platforms available, we still need to identify our current L&D objectives and extrapolate that to the future requirements to come up with the most suitable option. Now that requires some serious work.

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