TOP TRAINING COMPANY LMS TIPS
Your Learning Management System (LMS) allows you to manage all aspects of your organization’s learning and development program. This includes the creation, delivery, tracking and reporting for all training courses.
A LMS can streamline your training program by automating many of the manual tasks your department has to manage -- as long as you're taking advantage of all the features. This allows your L&D team to focus on planning, developing and implementing your training activities instead of maintaining and administering them.
Here are 10 features that can help you make the most of your LMS.
1. Access to all training materials in one convenient place
If your company is like most, you’ve accumulated a wide range of training materials for the many learning and development programs you offer, in formats such as Word documents, PowerPoint® presentations, videos, interactive webinars, tests and surveys. These are housed in the various departments offering the training or with HR. An LMS lets you store all training materials in one convenient place for easy access.
2. Integrate training modalities
Learning and development programs combine different types of training formats – Instructor-led Training (ILT) is often blended with eLearning. Most LMS platforms offer integration with popular webinar tools. They are also available from multiple devices – laptop, tablet, smartphone – enabling learners to take the training when and where it is convenient for them.
3. Train multiple groups
Some organizations need to train more than employees, offering courses for customers, partners and vendors. With a LMS you can assign different levels of access to the system for the various groups for added security.
4. Support Learning Paths
Organizing training, assigning courses and tracking completion can be labor intensive tasks for learning leaders. The Learning Path feature provided by an LMS can streamline this activity by arranging courses into paths based on department, role or location. Once learners have been registered in a Learning Path the training will be guided – learners will need to master one course or topic before they can move on to the next in the path, delivering a truly customized learning experience.
5. Manage registration
Once Learning Paths have been created and assigned, it’s time for learners to register for the courses. To make this process easier, the LMS provides a platform for learners to enroll themselves. It can end email invitations, provides automatic reminder emails to improve attendance and supports different time zones to schedule training at the local time.
6. Engage learners with gamification
Gamification has become a popular trend in learning and development. It is defined as adding elements of games to training to engage and motivate learners. Using gamification features available through a LMS such as points, badges, levels and leaderboards can make learning more fun and encourage learners to complete the courses.
7. Facilitate testing
To ensure the material in courses is understood and retained by learners, quizzes, tests or other evaluations can be created within the system. Most systems offer a variety of question formats – true/false, list matching, multiple choice, image based, sequencing and fill-in-the-blank to accommodate varying testing needs – provide scoring, and notify learners, learning leaders and managers of the results.
8. Award certifications
If learners will receive a certificate or certification, most systems allow you to upload certificate templates, customize them and generate the final certificate, all through a single system. When learners need to re-certify in any of the courses, many systems will track expiry dates and can alert the person of their certification renewal date.
9. Track training completion
A LMS can track the courses learners need to complete and assign a training timeline. It can notify the learning leader when participants have completed the training, send an alert if the training has not been completed or if the deadline is approaching, and automatically send online reminders.
10. Report on results
An important part of your job as a learning leader is to report on the performance of your learners, and of the overall training program. A LMS makes it easy for managers to see how their employees are performing and use the information for reviews as well as to determine if additional training is required. The organization can determine the most important training metrics to track, and customize the reports accordingly. Plus, the survey feature lets learners provide feedback about the training, which can be used to make changes to improve the overall program.
For assistance in choosing a cloud LMS, contact the corporate training experts at TrainingFolks.
