If you’ve been in the eLearning field for a while, you most certainly know what a learning management system (LMS) is.
Training platforms offer companies solutions to all of their business goals and allow them to take their corporate training to the next level by identifying knowledge and skill gaps more precisely, assessing employees’ qualifications regularly, and collecting progress reports. While this sounds reassuring, how exactly does an LMS help you upskill your workforce and what features are must-haves? Let’s take a look at that now.
Before starting, we’ll mention some points that are obvious.
To make sure we’re on the same page, let’s list a few LMS features that are vital for training:
User management
The platform allows you to add and edit users, create groups and departments, and assign roles to them.
Course management
A fundamental feature of all LMSs is that they enable you to upload training content, manage it, and assign it to learners.
Learning paths
If you have complex training programs that consist of multiple units, an LMS lets you organize them into a single learning path.
Mobile app
Only a few years ago, this was a rare feature for training platforms. Now, most people learn on their smartphones and tablets.
Without these features, a training platform wouldn’t be what it is. Now, let’s look at some other LMS capabilities that aren’t included in all LMSs but are essential for upskilling employees.
Course Authoring: Create Training Online
Most companies have several L&D tools for developing and delivering training programs. Well, at least these two: an authoring tool and an LMS. Authoring tools let you create online courses from scratch, so you can upload them to your training platform and assign them to learners. However, these are usually desktop tools with a limited number of authors. Moreover, some of them are pretty difficult to use, so not many of your colleagues will be able to create courses with them.
And that’s why a course authoring feature in your LMS would be so useful. Anyone with permission can develop training programs there, and the interface in leading LMSs, like iSpring Learn, is so intuitive that anyone will be able to create training content hassle free.
But why would I need to have anyone else create courses?
A fair question. You see, if we’re talking about making a real difference with training, meaning not simply training employees on fire safety and compliance but enhancing business processes, building team spirit, and encouraging continuous learning – this would be much easier to achieve with many people contributing to the goal, not only instructional designers.
For example, if you’re planning to run a marketing campaign and need to make sure that salespeople know the details of the offer and its concept, then the easiest way to do that would be to get a marketer to pack all this information into a longread article with images, videos, and knowledge checks.
And if some of the employees discover more effective ways to work, they can easily share their knowledge with their colleagues. Creating a course on training platforms, like iSpring Learn, takes only a few minutes, but what a great value it provides!
Reports: Know the Precise Qualifications of Your Team
Reporting engines are the weakest feature in most training platforms. Even if vendors tell you they include it, this is rarely what you expect. For instance, an LMS’s reports might include only who completed which training program and whether they passed a quiz. This won’t help you much with upskilling.
At the same time, some training platforms do have a strong reporting engine that generates detailed reports on learner progress. They let you see which quiz questions a particular employee finds most difficult, so you can assign a course to fill this knowledge gap. You can also see how much time a learner spent on a course – if they completed a 30-minute training in 2 minutes, it would be a fair guess they didn’t learn anything new.
Moreover, some LMSs, like iSpring Learn, offer you extra reporting options, such as a 360-degree performance appraisal module. This is one of the most insightful performance evaluation methods used by all large organizations. While quizzes only show you the hard skills of your team, this module reveals their soft skills: how creative they are, whether they are disciplined or not, what it is like to work with them, etc. The entire evaluation process doesn’t take more than a day and is entirely automated. As a result, you get an illustrative competency radar scan of each employee that looks like this:
This is a valuable resource that helps you identify training needs. And once you’ve run some training activities to upskill your employees, you can conduct the 360-degree review again and get a clear picture of how effective your training was. This is tremendously useful when you report to your superiors: just show them the competencies both before and after the activities (and be prepared to receive congratulations if you did well).
Gamification: Motivate Employees to Train Harder
Training is all great and we can talk for hours about how beneficial it is for teams and business, but none of this is true unless your employees are engaged. Lack of learner engagement is a crucial training issue nowadays. And it takes more than an LMS feature to resolve it. Still, if your training platform doesn’t provide you with capacities to engage employees, this will be much more difficult for you to overcome (yes, more difficult translates as impossible).
Gamification is one of those features that helps you engage employees while training. It works on basic principles – most people love friendly competition, achievements, and games. So, instead of threatening your team that their salary will be reduced or they won’t move up the career ladder if they don’t take corporate training seriously, consider making the learning experience feel like a game.
How an LMS can help you run game-like training
You can set how many points an employee receives for taking a course module or passing a quiz. Based on the total number of points, employees can be rewarded with badges, like “Quickest Mind” or “Wisdom Master” – you can name badges any way you like and use inside jokes.
All learners’ achievements will be displayed on the company’s leaderboard. It’s like those old beloved game machines: a person sees the other contestants’ scores and tries to beat them.
Go beyond training
If you really want to upskill your employees and improve business, you need to go beyond training. Training platforms, like iSpring Learn, come with many extra features, like an organization chart where you can see the hierarchy of the company and find the needed colleague in seconds; or a company’s newsfeed that shows the latest news, business results, events, etc. – to build team spirit and help everyone keep abreast of the latest updates. And so very much more.
If you want to see how iSpring Learn can help your particular project, book a free live demo and let’s talk!
