A Guide to Learning Management Systems: An Essential Tool for Learning and Development

In recent decades, learning and development have become ingrained in company culture, with many more organisations investing resources and finances into expanding their learning and development opportunities.

As a result, the market for learning and development tools has seen seismic growth in recent years, with new software solutions, productivity apps, and innovative services emerging each week. For innovation-minded companies committed to modernising their approach to training, this can lead to a ‘kid-in-a-candy-store’ mentality where eager HR, compliance, and training managers gravitate towards the newest and most cutting-edge solutions.

However, in all this excitement, it's important to remember the older, more well-established option often still has a role to play. In this case, that means ensuring that your organisation does not overlook the benefits that learning management systems (LMS) offer, as this tried-and-tested technology can still offer several key benefits that your business cannot do without.

If learning management systems are a new concept for you and your business, we’ve created a thorough guide so that you can understand exactly what they are, why they’re beneficial for your organisation, and what they can help you achieve. 

What Are Learning Management Systems?

Learning management systems, also known as LMS, are software used to help businesses deliver, monitor, manage, track, and generally administrate bespoke training programs for learning and development efficiently and effectively. 

Many organisations across a number of sectors are now utilising LMS in their day-to-day operations. For example, L&D teams in large corporations often utilise learning management systems to help them run upskilling or reskilling programs. Additionally, HR departments or compliance officers will often use them to deliver company-wide essential training like health and safety. LMS can even be used to help your staff expand their product knowledge so that they’re up-to-date on new products to improve sales and enhance customer experience. 

How Does An LMS Work?

The comprehensive infrastructure of a learning management system can help you manage and organise your learning and development activities in a flexible and customisable way. 

E-learning is widely recognised as one of the best ways of training employees, because it’s easy to facilitate, is interactive and engaging, and can be easily tracked. An LMS will generally work with dozens if not hundreds of types of e-learning courses.

You simply upload the course to the LMS and it can be used by a learner, whether in their own or an allocated period. The LMS functions as a portal through which a learner accesses and completes the course, including studying and taking any tests.

The basic principle of learning management software is that it provides a medium to deliver material to learners, carry out tests, keep track of results, and monitor performance trends. Users can be anyone who needs to see and interact with learning courses.

What Are The Key Benefits of Learning Management Systems?

There are several benefits of learning management systems in a professional environment, and they can support you significantly in meeting your business’ training goals and needs. We’ve delved into some of the biggest benefits of learning management systems below.

Have Access to Information Anytime, Anywhere

LMS systems offer a convenient and flexible way to deliver training to staff who work remotely and may be dotted around the world. Particularly in our current day and age, where hybrid and remote working is common, access to accurate and up-to-date information regardless of location is crucial to the success of your business, especially when launching a new product. 

An LMS tool can be accessed on various devices and staff can log in and out at their convenience, with their progress recorded as they go along.

Reduces Training Time and Costs

Investing in a cost-effective LMS tool can transform the way you manage your training material. It opens the door for you to fast-track your training programmes so that you can train more staff at once, rather than have them attend costly face-to-face classes. 

An affordable learning management system also cuts out the need for laborious paperwork and printed training materials, helping you keep to your budget. 

Offers a Centralised System

Thanks to learning management systems, your business training resources are all in one user-friendly, easily accessible place. From here, your staff can easily navigate your training materials. 

It may be that your current employees need to revise content to keep their skillsets up-to-date, which in turn boosts on-the-job performance. Or, your new employees need to get up to speed at a quick pace with essential skills and job knowledge. Either way, with an LMS all of your organisation’s information is readily available and stored on one system. 

What Can You Achieve By Using Learning Management Systems? 

When it comes to the goals that your business has for learning and development, learning management systems can be a vital tool to help you achieve these. We’ve highlighted a few core ways that learning management systems can help your business build a strong and successful learning and development offering:

Compiling and Creating Exciting and Engaging Content Resources

Demonstrate the practicalities of your products by creating fun, exciting, and highly impactful content. Learning management systems can host a range of e-learning materials, which is ideal as everyone has their own learning preferences. 

If you’re creating your own content on learning management systems, you can use a mix of multimedia to create an interactive educational experience, including videos, animations, and games. The use of both visual and audio-visual aids makes training simple and straightforward, as well as improving knowledge retention. 

Equally, you can add humour to make your content more relatable and enjoyable to learners, or use walk-through scenarios and virtual reality examples to make them more relatable. Remember to break up detailed segments of information too to make this more digestible.

Alternatively, you can compile a range of existing resources and training materials on your learning management system and easily segregate these to make it easy for your learners to know what training they should be undertaking. Thanks to the centralised system of an LMS, this is all the more simple.

A Better Customer Focus

To be able to offer excellent customer service, your staff need to know their products well. Thanks to learning management systems, you can improve your organisation’s customer service by providing training materials that cover customer traits, buying behaviours, and needs, which is essential for succeeding in this sector. Equally, by documenting the selling points, benefits, and unique features of every product, employees can gain the confidence to sell and upsell, thereby increasing the profitability of your business. 

An LMS tool can help you structure your training so that your employees can walk their customers through every step in the process, and thereby improve their ability to educate customers on the job.

Capture Insightful Feedback and Monitor Progress

Learning management systems enable you to create assessments and practice quizzes which can test and improve your learners’ understanding of the content. Providing correct answer feedback enables your staff to revise any gaps in their knowledge, thereby improving their job competency.

As an administrator of the LMS, you can track your staff’s development and check their performance in assessments by running progress reports. The ability to track progress allows you to identify achievements, future training needs, and to ensure that nobody slips through the net when it comes to things like refresher courses that need to be completed.

The facility to gather evaluative feedback from your staff enables you to continuously improve your training material. Reporting is quick and easy too, with all of the relevant information about current levels of training within the business available to easily deliver to whoever needs it.

Are Learning Management Systems Better Than Other Training Methods?

Learning management software has been used by various organisations since the 1990s, meaning they have a lengthy history by technology standards. This is a testament to the enduring benefits they can still provide for businesses of all backgrounds.

However, with the rapid acceleration of technological advancement, it's understandable that some would question the continued relevance of learning management systems, especially considering that many of the key tools and functions they offer can be replicated by other apps and software.

But, in comparison, these non-specialised tools struggle to match the core benefit of the learning management system - its integrated, centralised nature. As previously addressed, with an LMS tool in place, companies can manage their entire learning and development process end-to-end with a single piece of software. This keeps all of the learner data in the same place and measures performance trends over time in a way that's easy to monitor at a glance. 

LMS designs can also be adapted to cater to a variety of business needs, including software that can be licensed and hosted locally, as well as software-as-a-service models that can be accessed remotely from any device.

As a tool for learning, LMS uses e-learning, which is in many ways superior to alternatives. Because e-learning packages are put together by experts (and generally accredited by awarding bodies) they can be relied upon as excellent sources of information. As such, you know that your employees will have all of the right information presented to them, even if there are course managers with differing knowledge on the subject. 

The courses themselves are generally engaging and interactive, and small parts of them can be completed at a time, which reduces the expensive need for sending out employees for training days. Many people will find that they are able to study more effectively when using a course through an LMS tool than they do in a classroom during a seminar.

FAQs

What Are The Three Major Types of Learning Management Systems?

Learning management systems can be classified into three main categories: cloud-based LMS, self-hosted LMS, and open-source LMS. 

Cloud-based LMS uses the internet to its advantage so that learners can access resources and content from anywhere at any time. Self-hosted LMS allows for customisation and control, where companies and institutes can tailor their learning experiences to their wants and needs. Finally, open-source LMS helps to encourage collaboration among different companies and institutions, which means the LMS tool stays updated in line with new features and developments. 

How to Pick a Learning Management System? 

Selecting an LMS tool that is best for your business needs you to take four main steps:

• What are your organisational learning and development needs and how does a LMS system align with this?
• What do you want your LMS system to offer? E.g., does your LMS system need to be cloud-based?
• Consider the learning management systems on the market: This includes their pricing and the support that they can offer. 
• Select your LMS tool: Consider trialling it for free to make sure it’s the perfect fit for your business. 

What Are The Three Pillars of Knowledge Management? 

The three pillars of knowledge management are people, processes, and technology. These three components are interdependent in organisations and they help employers and management teams to be fully integrated and conscious of implemented processes to continuously develop and improve. Additionally, these individuals use technology to assist them in achieving this.

Summary 

There are all sorts of ways to approach a learning and development strategy, but investing in a comprehensive learning management system is likely to be one of the best solutions to be successful in your efforts. Given the range of benefits and functionality of learning management systems that we’ve expanded on in this article, you can empower and inspire your team with knowledge-driven e-learning content to ensure the future success of your company. 

If you’re considering a learning management system for your business, why not find out more about our Enable Learning Management System? This delivers a once-of-a-kind learner experience that makes managing and organising your business’ online learning all the more simple. 

You can also get in touch with our team, who has 27 years of experience in helping organisations, to solve your learning technology challenges and find the best solution for you.