Why Should Your Company Get An Online Training Platform (LMS)?

The business world sometimes plunges into uncertain times, as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated. For a business to thrive, despite unexpected future events, it needs efficient digital resources that can be deployed anytime, anywhere. While some businesses are still reluctant to make a move, it’s a no-brainer that technological solutions are the way to go. Implementing a Learning Management System (LMS) is a great solution to help companies easily manage, monitor, and report training activities. The global LMS market was worth over $8 billion in 2019 and will grow to about $38 billion by 2027, indicating a steep and growing demand for the product. This post dives into what an LMS is and why your company needs to consider implementing one to streamline the training and onboarding process while decreasing costs, time, and stress.

Learning Management System in a nutshell

A Learning Management System is an online software program that provides a vehicle for the exchange of training or learning curriculum. Its seamless delivery of online training allows organizations across all industries to deploy virtual training to end-users, which could include employees, suppliers, customers, and partners. An online training platform is made up of at least two interfaces; one for instructors, Administrators, and managers, which allows those roles to assign, track, and evaluate results of training on its end-users. The other is for your Learners, taking place on a sleek, easy-to-use platform that allows end-users to create consistency in their roles, learn new skills, and stay safe and compliant. If you’re still not convinced how an LMS solution can benefit your company, here are the top reasons you must consider installing it.

Organized, trackable content in a centralized location

If you do not have a training platform, odds are you are focusing on one of two different ways to train. In this section, we’ll look into both and see why they are inefficient and old-fashioned compared to an LMS. 

Loose Documentation and DIY Process 

Having an LMS system is better than staying on a decentralized platform where you need to constantly send various loose documents to Learners without the ability for feedback, reporting, certifications, gamification, or transcripts. If you’re sending PDFs, Documents, PowerPoints, and videos to employees to help them learn, a formalized platform stores all your eLearning materials in one location, minimizing the risk of losing crucial data or forgetting to assign it.

An LMS platform makes it easier to create a course and eliminates the need to store content on different devices and hard drives. A centralized content storage platform makes it easier for every team member to access the information from any location, a factor that makes LMS platforms a natural fit for online collaboration. This also creates accountability for Learners, since Administrators can see details about when and how courses are completed.

If you’re worried about having to implement all of your aforementioned eLearning materials into your LMS, don’t be! This is exactly why Knowledge Anywhere created Scormify – a SCORM conversion tool that instantly transforms your training into SCORM compliant materials that can be uploaded into any training platform. 

Traditional In-Person Learning

If you’re looking for more flexible schedules, higher attendance, and more time and money, then a training platform outperforms traditional in-person learning. Online training means Learners do not have to adhere to strict schedules, with the added company benefit of nixing expensive flights and hotels costs. Read on for a more in-depth view of how eLearning saves time and money later in this article!

Easily Track Learner Progress and Performance

With the best learning software, you can easily track corporate learners’ progress. Doing so provides insights into how well they’re meeting their performance milestones and the areas that require improvement. For example, you can provide supplemental resources to boost the learning behaviors of users who cannot complete the training for various reasons. Most LMS platforms incorporate a reporting and analytics feature that enables users to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of a course. You can easily track where the learners are struggling in a specific course and make the necessary modifications.

Unlimited Access to eLearning Materials

Upon uploading and publishing your eLearning course materials onto the LMS system, learning participants gain unlimited access to all required data. They can learn mobile or using just-in-time once they log in through smartphones or tablets. The added benefit of this is that they don’t have to wait until the next online learning session to perfect their work-related skills. Users can move conveniently, prioritizing their time with more efficiency, with an added bonus to global audiences operating in different time zones or shift workers with various office hours.

Keeps Organizations Updated with Compliance Regulations

An LMS platform can be an invaluable tool for organizations that must stay up-to-date with compliance regulations. Changes are inevitable and ongoing in relation to compliance with laws. Applying manual updates to a course to reflect these changes can be daunting. With a corporate Learning Management System, your company can conveniently add new compliance standards to an online training course within a few minutes. That way, corporate learners stay up-to-date with the latest regulations, protecting your business from costly non-compliance penalties. Similarly, you have the upper hand in ensuring all employees stay on the same page concerning company policies and expectations, decreasing employee turnover rates.

Reduced Costs of Training and Development

Let’s address the obvious – no one wants to pay for a training program when you already have a free way to train new employees.

However, this is small in comparison to what in-person learning could be. According to Dave Evans, IBM saved around $200 million after switching to eLearning. So how did the switch save them? In this section, you’ll find out how eLearning can help significantly cut costs by simultaneously benefitting employees, management, and customers of your business. eLearning may not be free, but it can allow you to spend smarter, not more. Read more about How Investing in Online Training Can Cut Costs and Increase ROI in our free guide. 

• Reducing travel: 
  One huge way eLearning reduces employee costs is a reduction in travel expenses. An eLearning platform renders geographical location irrelevant for training. With online training, employees can access their courses from anywhere, eliminating the need to pay for employees to physically attend training, as well as the need to pay for a professional to travel to your offices to train employees. This cuts down on multiple associated costs, including flights, hotels, and food reimbursements.
• Saving time: 
  If time is money, online training saves employees both, compared to traditional, in-person training. Instead of wasting hours getting to and from airports, conference rooms, and planes, workers can spend that time actually learning. If there was no in-person training, human resources, management, and accounting would not need to spend time sorting out reimbursement, approval, and costs. This frees up more time, so they can focus on ways to efficiently train employees without going through all of the hassle and logistics of travel.
• Smooth onboarding: 
  One way eLearning can be thrifty for management is by smoothing the onboarding process. Onboarding new employees can be time-consuming, repetitive, and stressful for managers. Automated online onboarding keeps the manager’s role in onboarding to only the most important and needed elements of the process. This saves the organization money by helping managers stay out of the unneeded elements of onboarding.
• Less legal fees: 
  If a corporation has an automated process for which to assign necessary compliance, safety training, and necessary certifications, they can easily and effortlessly avoid possible legal fees. Late fees and court can get expensive!
• Decreased turnover: 
  Training new employees is not only a headache, it’s a huge cost. Even with better training, the time that it takes to find and vet qualified applicants, interviewing, negotiating, and getting them started is a lot more costly than simply keeping current employees. With better training comes more employee satisfaction and retention.
• Reduced confusion and support hours: 
  The faster customers can understand how to use a product, the more satisfied they will be. Providing an easily accessible library of training allows customers to quickly understand your product and how to start getting value out of it. This will start their relationship with your organization off on the right foot while reducing potentially long and frustrating customer support hours.

While that may seem like an obvious statement, the cost of NOT implementing a training system may be higher than you realize. In fact, many companies report cost savings and increased ROI from using an LMS. Investing in a training platform means there are upfront costs.

Scale your training as your company shrinks and grows

A growing business brings happiness to the owner, but growing revenue and success can be hard to manage. Growth comes with new hires, updating products, and setting up new departments. Those changes and improvements are only possible with a proper training system to keep employees in the loop. An LMS platform enables companies to scale up their training and manage growth. It becomes easier to assign previous training materials, update current content, and add new content.