5 signs you need a learning management system

When do you need a learning management system (LMS)? You may be surprised to find that it’s not when you reach a certain organizational size or have a large enough learning and development program – needing an LMS can come far before that, even for small companies. Here are the top signs you need an LMS. 

1. Your training resources are scattered

Something that plagues many organizations is disorganization around training materials. You may have a multitude of PowerPoints – each with multiple versions, videos saved in different locations, Google docs, Google surveys, and a variety of different platforms and programs like Zoom and webinar management tools – all to support your training program.

Piecemeal training materials are not only stressful on administrators. They’re also stressful on learners. They cause confusion and disengagement. And can lead to low completion rates while frustrating employees and admins alike. 

Add to that employees used approximately 64 hours on learning and development in the workplace in 2021 – a number that’s growing year over year, according to Statista. When you multiply those hours by hundreds or thousands of employees or learners, things can become unmanageable quite fast, and scattered training can build a reputation you don’t want. 

On the other hand, an LMS training management system centralizes training programs, making them easily manageable and accessible for learners. Depending on the LMS, you can often create tailored learning paths and checklists that make it easy for a learner to know what they should do next. 

An LMS offers you the ability to:

• Store all course materials in one location
• Easily update courses as materials change
• Administer consistent courses across the organization

Combatting training resource fragmentation by centralizing it all in an LMS is one way to make sure employees are getting the benefits of professional development and training regularly. It also reduces costs by eliminating the need for a variety of tools and platforms. 

2. You can’t track training

Assigning your employees training is one thing, but seeing how they progress and how they perform is another.

In traditional training settings, someone not only facilitates the training itself but also tracks and records employee attendance and progress as well. But, even then, these insights are limited and can be inaccurate with manual efforts alone. And, just as important, they can take up a lot of time and valuable resources.

One of the major benefits of an LMS is that it makes training trackable and can give you deep data insights. With LMS tracking and reporting, you can check attendance, automate reports, track the progress of users, and store transcripts with ease. 

Powerful reporting can give you insights into what’s working for your audience, and what isn’t. And you get all of that with just a few clicks rather than hours of manual labor. You can use these insights to provide specific training to individual learners or make workforce-wide changes that increase business productivity and ROI. 

3. You need to train remotely

Working remotely has certainly accelerated in recent years. And over 40 million people in the US expect to have roles that are fully remote in the next five years according to a 2021 survey – a projection that increased by about 5% from the previous year. 

Having the ability to reach and educate remote workers will be paramount in the future as more and more employees will be working remotely. It’s been proven that remote workers are especially susceptible to feelings of isolation and disengagement, and training could be one key to long-term remote employee retention and satisfaction. 

A new study revealed that workers who start a job feeling undertrained or disconnected from their work environment are more likely to quit than employees who receive adequate training and good onboarding process – something that is compounded even more for remote and global workers. 

Solid onboarding processes and ongoing trainings can make all the difference in keeping remote employees long-term. They keep remote employees connected to their teams, other employees within the organization, and the company’s mission and values. 

One of the best, and undervalued, things about an LMS is its benefits to organizations that support remote workers. An employee onboarding LMS not only allows companies to provide reliable and robust onboarding, but it lets them deliver ongoing trainings. And it can save organizations a lot of money by eliminating the need for expensive in-person gatherings. 

On top of that, an LMS makes it easy for companies to roll out new policies, procedures, and products. They can adjust to fast-changing regulations and protect themselves from liability, ensuring their remote workforce is up to speed.  

4. Employees aren’t engaged in the training process

You spend hours creating great content to train your audience. You create fun presentations and videos, but you just can’t seem to get people excited about learning and development. 

Maybe you’ve been there, or maybe you have just wondered if your employees really get anything out of your professional development. Either way, you need to make sure the time you’re investing in employee learning is worth it. 

The trick to getting buy-in from your employees is simply to take them from observer to participant, or from passive learning to active learning, with interactive elements. Collaborative learning and gamification are some of the best ways to punch up training and increase engagement. 

Collaborative learning, similar to social learning, brings employees together and allows them to collaboratively learn from one another through discussions, brainstorming, and problem-solving activities. The best thing about collaborative learning is that it gets learners into an active state of learning which has been proven to drastically improve engagement and knowledge retention. 

Gamification is another great way to increase engagement. In a survey where employees were asked about gamification, it found 83% of employees who completed gamified training felt motivated. In contrast, 61% of employees receiving training without gamification felt unmotivated, distracted, and bored while completing training.

With things like easy-to-use content tools, an LMS makes offering gamified features like quizzes, branching scenarios, virtual tours, leaderboards, badges, and certificates extremely simple. And an LMS can often double as a social learning platform through live event features and virtual classrooms for increased engagement. 

5. You need industry compliance

Did you know that organizations lose an average of $5.87 million in revenue due to a single non-compliance event? And that doesn’t include other losses like business disruption, employee turnover, and reputation damage. 

In highly-regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and human resources, compliance is even more challenging. Small and large organizations alike can struggle to maintain compliance because of the complexities associated with regulations and the number of employees to keep track of. 

The great thing about an LMS is that it can do the heavy lifting for you when it comes to compliance. It can automatically keep track of training completion rates and some systems even have simple-view reporting, making it even easier on administrators to know off-hand their compliance rates. 

With an LMS for compliance training you can automate enrollments, recertifications, and reminders. And pull granular reports whenever you need to make auditing fast and simple as well as quickly update courses according to new regulations, taking the stress out of compliance. 

A learning management system centralizes learning programs, increasing ROI 

A learning management system streamlines and centralizes learning programs, making them manageable, trackable, and more effective. By leveraging an LMS for online learning, organizations can reduce admin burden and associated costs and create a learning experience that’s fun and engaging. 

With Tovuti’s LMS, administrators can easily create engaging courses, distribute multimedia learning materials, provide feedback, host collaborative learning sessions, use granular data insights to improve their program effectiveness, and more – all from one platform. 

And with the most robust gamified and interactive features on the market, including over 40 plug-and-play gamified features, leaderboards, and virtual classrooms, learners are sure to retain more information and have fun doing it!