HR leaders everywhere are thinking about employee retention. Reports show that 51% of U.S. employees are open to leaving their organizations, whether they’re keeping an eye out or actively looking. If you’re concerned about turnover, too, you may be searching for new strategies to retain your people.
Enter employee learning and development. Did you know 39% of employees said that they’re likely to leave their jobs for one that offers a better learning and development program? A lack of opportunity for professional growth is consistently one of the most common reasons people quit. So it’s no surprise that when it’s offered, it helps keep them around.
But unfortunately, there’s a significant disconnect between what employees expect and what they get for learning and development at work. While 84% of employees said their employers should provide the ongoing training and education they need to stay up-to-date in their roles, 51% of executives said their L&D programs are a “waste of time.” They also felt that employees were “very satisfied” with the programs, but only 32% of employees agreed.
These statistics show there’s no question whether or not employees want to learn. But, most companies are not delivering employee learning and development programs that serve their people’s needs and make them feel secure in their roles — let alone prepare them to take on new roles.
So, how can you deliver targeted, useful, and engaging learning experiences? How can you give employees the benefits of structured programs and motivate them with personalized development plans?
It’s all possible with a learning management system (LMS).
Find out what an LMS does and some of the key features you should look for, then learn more about how using the software benefits your people and your business.
What Is an LMS?
A learning management system (LMS) is a software platform that helps organizations create, manage, and deliver educational and training programs to their people. An LMS is useful for more than just targeted development initiatives aimed at retaining employees. You can leverage its features to deliver mandatory training courses, like an anti-harassment module during onboarding or continuing education required to retain licenses and certifications.
An LMS helps refine and expand the employee's skill set while delivering reliable insights on progress. It also removes the burden of starting from scratch every time a need for learning materials or courses arises. With an LMS, you can quickly access and deploy online learning, saving tons of time for HR and employees. You’ll reduce — and often eliminate — time spent on:
- Traveling to and from in-person and offsite training sessions
- Coordinating instructor-led training sessions
- Creating new learning objects and compiling materials
With an LMS, you can standardize learning paths while ensuring they’re tailored to your organization. Imagine you’re creating a career path from human resources generalist to HR manager. Your company requires generalists to earn SHRM-SCP certification to advance, a common prerequisite.
But at your organization, they must also complete a series of leadership courses and aptitude tests to be eligible for the promotion. Building this learning path in your LMS makes it easy for employees to see how they can move up and helps ensure internal candidates are ready for the position.
You can also appeal to a variety of learning preferences with an LMS by offering in-person events, virtual events, eLearning courses, streaming videos, downloadable resources, and more in your learning program. Some LMS even offer gamified learning, in which users can earn points and badges, level up to new ranks, and compete against colleagues. Your company can tie that to employee recognition and rewards, offering prizes and perks as your people achieve the desired learning behaviors, like completing courses or acing quizzes.
Many LMS platforms are cloud-based, which means courses and materials are accessible anywhere users can access the internet. Think of employees who report to a vehicle instead of an office or a shop — training goes with them wherever they go.
Many LMS solutions are optimized for mobile devices, too. The best LMS solutions offer both a mobile app and a responsive website, making it easy for employees to complete online training courses at their convenience.
LMS platforms also enable companies to generate reports and use their employee learning data for…more learning! Reports offer insight into progress and completion rates, engagement with course content, employees’ learning histories, and more.
How Are Learning Management Systems Used?
We mentioned a few ways companies can use LMS solutions, but let’s take a closer look at some of the most common use cases.
- Onboarding New Employees: Anytime you start a new job, there’s a lot to learn, and the faster you learn, the faster you become a productive employee. With an LMS, you can ensure every new hire receives the highest training standards, accessing the most relevant materials about company culture and history, the company’s products and services, and more.
- Corporate Training Programs: An LMS is an excellent tool for any organization that needs to create consistent, scalable training programs accessible to employees across departments and locations. These could include courses on company policies and procedures or particular technical or soft skills, such as leadership development.
- Compliance Training: Depending on the state, industry, or company size, you may be required to conduct compliance-based training, such as anti-harassment training, on an annual basis. Depending on your industry and employees’ roles, there may be even more training required around health and safety or laws and regulations. An LMS helps ensure training is up-to-date and accessible and that everyone has completed their courses.
- Sales and Product Training: Sales teams routinely receive training on the products or services they offer, as well as on how to sell those products or services. With an LMS, you can easily design and distribute training materials, giving every sales team member access to helpful materials so they have the skills and knowledge they need to sell effectively.
- Continuing Education for Professionals: In many roles, employees need to keep up with industry trends, learn new skills, and maintain certifications. With an educational hub in the LMS that houses materials, including webinars and online courses, you can ensure your employees routinely sharpen their skills to stay competitive.
- Customer Training Programs: Customers often need targeted education on the products and services a business offers, which businesses can create and deliver with an LMS platform. With access to helpful videos, tutorials, guides, and more, customers can then learn how to use a business’s products or services most effectively. That leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty while reducing the burden on your customer support team.
- Franchisee Training Programs: A hallmark of a franchised business is the consistent experience they offer to their customers at every location. From branding and building design to the products they sell, franchisees need to adhere to brand standards and meet performance goals. An LMS provides a way to train franchisees on brand standards and company protocol across locations and enables quick updates when changes occur.
- Performance Management: With an LMS that’s integrated with your performance management system, you can tie learning and development to employee performance. You can measure their development via assessment scores and certifications earned, determine whether additional training helped them improve, and more accurately identify their strengths and areas for improvement.
- Employee Recognition: Use your learning and development strategy to help employees grow and to better appreciate and reward your people. Create internal learning competitions, with celebrations and prizes for winners. Gamification can motivate employees with badges and rank achievements. All of these help create a culture of learning at your organization.
10 Key Features of an LMS
LMS software is much more than just a content management system for storing your company’s internal sales training videos, SOPs for each department, and the cybersecurity course employees take once a year. It can be an integral part of your talent management strategy — if you look for these essential LMS features.
1. Course Management
Choosing an LMS with tools for creating custom training materials is vital. You can design structured learning paths specific to your organization and include multimedia, quizzes, assessments, and more.
2. Content Management
Look for an LMS that can store all your learning content in one place. When you can easily access all of your materials, you can quickly put together new training programs, update materials and make them available immediately, and find and share resources. You can also view the version history of learning resources to help ensure information is up-to-date.
3. User Management
User management means that administrators of your LMS can create user profiles and assign roles. The best LMS solutions offer multitenancy, which allows you to organize learners into groups or departments, each with its own look and feel. That allows you to deliver targeted training and educational materials to specific user groups, as well as keep an eye on their course completion, training progress, and more.
4. Assessment and Testing
Your LMS needs assessment and testing capabilities, like tests and assignments, so you can evaluate employee proficiency and knowledge retention. Go beyond knowledge transfer to knowledge application with behavioral assessments that allow learners to demonstrate their mastery.
5. Branding and Customization
The best LMS solutions let you add your own branding and custom elements so you can align this important part of talent management with your brand. Strengthen company culture and brand identity across your organization with a branded LMS.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
An AI-enhanced LMS comes with perks for learning administrators and employee learners. For administrators, AI can help:
- Produce course content, like quiz questions
- Recommend learning content to groups or individual learners
- Automatically organize and tag content by topic, type, and more
For employees, an LMS with AI can:
- Offer real-time feedback as they progress through courses
- Create learning objects such as descriptions, tests, and images
- Help guide their learning journey with recommendations
7. Reporting and Analytics
Reporting and analytics in your LMS give managers at every level a real-time view of learner progress using native reporting dashboards, data visualization tools, and custom reporting functions. Reporting reflects learner engagement, supports corporate strategies, and reinforces alignment with company initiatives. Learning analytics help document that your investment is driving results.
8. Integration with Other Systems
As with any new business software product you’re scouting, it’s important to look for an LMS that integrates with any relevant systems you already use. Whether the purchase of an LMS is the duty of HR or your learning team, collaborate to ensure you choose the best-fit software to leverage learning in your organization.
9. User-Friendly Interface
If your LMS is hard to navigate, or employees can’t view it on their mobile devices, you may have a hard time getting them to log in and engage with it. Don’t forget to evaluate the ease of use for teams that will use the LMS on the administrative side, too. Make sure the technology meets the learners where they are and that they find it intuitive.
10. Gamification
Incorporating "behavioral nudges" within a learning program can help motivate learners. These gamification elements can encourage learners to complete learning activities or better engage with the process. Instilling a little friendly competition with points and leaderboards can drive real results. Look for an LMS with points, badges, leaderboards, and other game-like features, and try a new way of motivating your people.
9 Benefits of a Learning Management System
As we pointed out at the beginning of this article, L&D is a top priority for today’s employees and candidates. When you think of some of their other priorities, including work-life balance and having a sense of purpose, a clear theme emerges: people want to work for an organization that cares about them as people.
When employees feel seen and heard, they’re more engaged with their jobs. They’re more productive and creative and tend to be more loyal to their company. And what better way to show employees you care about them than by making their priorities yours?
Engaging employees and potential employees is just one of the plethora of benefits of implementing an LMS. Check out nine more:
- Accessible and Flexible: An LMS empowers employees to complete training and further their knowledge on their own schedule and at their own pace, and often via their ideal learning style. This is essential for teams that are remote or hybrid and at companies whose employees work out in the field and in-office.
- Cost-Effective: With its digital delivery, an LMS helps companies save on the costs of hiring instructors or outsourcing training. It can eliminate or reduce other expenses like renting training space, traveling to and from a venue, and printing educational materials.
- Personalizes Learning: Personalization is key for showing employees that they’re important to your organization. An LMS enables you to easily create and curate relevant, custom learning paths based on employees’ roles, skill levels, and career goals.
- Improves Compliance and Tracking: Stop wasting time checking records and reminding employees to complete compliance-related courses. Send automatic notifications and reminders, track completion rates, and quickly generate compliance reports when you use an LMS.
- Scalable: Whether your business is just starting out or you’ve expanded globally, your LMS can scale. As you grow, your LMS can accommodate a complex org chart, a larger number of users, and more variety in the types of courses and materials offered.
- Centralizes Learning Resources: Keeping all of your learning materials and courses updated in the LMS ensures that everyone can easily find them and that they’re easy for your team to update.
- Enhances Collaboration: Many LMS platforms have collaboration tools that allow users to ask questions and discuss the materials. With these tools, your employees can share knowledge and engage with their peers, which enables a deeper understanding of the course or materials and creates a better learning experience.
- Streamlines Administration: The management of learning programs —scheduling courses, enrolling employees, and tracking their progress — is a huge task. But with an LMS, all of these tasks can be performed automatically, and your HR and learning teams can take back these valuable hours.
- Enables Data-Informed Decisions: An LMS gives you access to valuable data around performance and engagement with courses and materials, which you can use to identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement. Then, you can make data-informed decisions to make learning programs more effective, optimize resource allocation, and improve learning outcomes.
ClearCompany: Your Talent Management System With a Fully-Integrated LMS
It’s never been easier to integrate learning into every part of the employee journey than with the Brainier LMS by ClearCompany. Whether you’re training new hires, upskilling a group of people in the same role, or tracking a top performer’s career progression, ClearCompany equips your organization with the tools for success. Educate, engage, and empower your employees when you choose a Talent Management System with an LMS.
Explore Brainier, the Learning Management System by ClearCompany.
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