How to Choose an LMS for Your Organization’s Training Needs?

Is your organization new to eLearning? Or are you planning to replace your current learning management system? No matter what, the success of your training initiatives depends largely on your LMS selection. That’s why you need an LMS Buyer’s Guide. That said, how to choose an LMS that is best-suited to your organization? No shortcuts, as far as we could think of! Yet, by following some essential guidelines, you can get your LMS choice right. This LMS Buyer’s Guide is intended to help you select the right LMS that fits your bill.

What will you learn from this guide:

1. Why do you need a learning management system?
2. What are the LMS features to look out for?
3. Understanding the different types of LMS
4. Deciding on your budget
5. 7 steps to consider when choosing an LMS

Why Do You Need an LMS?

Various studies highlight the growing relevance of LMS in employee training.

1. 70% of employees report higher engagement levels with on-the-job training.
2. 78% of organizations report that capability building is crucial to their long-term growth.

Top Reasons Your Organization Needs an LMS

By implementing a learning management system, you can:

1. Help your employees access training anywhere, at any time.
2. Impart training when you or your learners (employees) need it most.
3. Offer learners the flexibility to absorb training materials at their own pace.
4. Streamline the process of tracking learning progress, analyzing training results, and sharing feedback.
5. Automate some of the routine learning functions, such as enrollments, course cataloging, etc.
6. Deliver compliance training, new employee orientation courses, and other mandatory training.
7. Improve training effectiveness. Save your training department’s time for more significant tasks, such as one-on-one mentoring or coaching.

Before deciding to adopt an LMS, you need to define what your core requirements are and understand how to choose an LMS for the best results. 

Read More: LXP vs LMS: A Comprehensive Comparison

Key LMS Features to Look Out For

1. Course and User Management
2. Tracking and Reporting
3. Mobile Learning
4. AI-Powered Learning Personalization
5. Learning Gamification
6. Inbuilt Course Authoring
7. Feedback and Learning Journal
8. Integration with Other Platforms
9. Certifications

1. Course and User Management

Make sure the LMS you choose helps you with course administration and user management. Using the LMS, your L&D admins should be able to:

1. Define course units/structure, schedule courses, allocate trainers, track learning progress, and manage all the key aspects of course creation and delivery.
2. Define user roles and permissions based on the organizational hierarchy, create learning groups, control user access to courses, and manage learners.

2. Tracking and Reporting

The right LMS supports you with eLearning tracking and progress reporting. That way, you can be free from the hassles of paper reports and daunting spreadsheets. 

Make sure the LMS you’re planning to adopt helps you with the following:

1. Analyze how employees have performed in training sessions and post-lesson assessments.
2. Create customizable dashboards and progress reports displaying real-time insights on every aspect of employee learning.
3. Track course attendance, module-wise progress, course completion, and learners’ performance.
4. Connect the LMS with third-party analysis tools to derive actionable insights on learning progress and employee performance.

3. Mobile Learning

Anytime, anywhere learning is one of the biggest advantages of eLearning. And that’s exactly what mobile learning helps you with.

Use these questions to assess the mobile learning features offered by your LMS:

1. Does the LMS provide intuitive and secure mobile apps for learners compatible across multiple platforms and operating systems, such as iOS and Android?
2. Does the LMS mobile app allow users to quickly find and enroll in courses all by themselves?
3. Does the mobile app allow employees to complete learning from anywhere, at their own pace? 
4. Does the mobile app use technology to deliver customized learning feeds that match the interests, job roles, and skills of your learners? 

4. AI-Powered Learning Personalization

An AI-powered LMS helps speed up the discovery of relevant training content. AI and ML-powered course recommendations place personalized content in front of your employees. It will save your training department’s time and effort, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks.

Personalized learning through AI helps:

1. Recommend specific courses that align with the individual needs of learners.
2. Increase learner engagement and enhance retention rates.

5. Learning Gamification

How does a gamified LMS help transform your training experience?

1. Encourage your learners with virtual rewards such as points and badges.
2. Make training interesting and fun for employees.
3. Motivate learners to take more courses.
4. Boost employee engagement and knowledge retention, productivity, and profitability.
5. Instill in your employees a sense of competition and accomplishment.

6. Inbuilt Course Authoring

Make sure the LMS supports all your course creation, publishing, and delivery requirements. Look for a corporate training LMS that offers:

1. User-friendly, built-in content authoring tools to create, publish, and manage eLearning content and course materials with ease.
2. An extensive course library to store and retrieve all your eLearning content easily.
3. Reusable content/ course templates that can be used/ updated to train multiple batches of learners.
4. Create and offer multiple formats of eLearning content, including videos, text, images, documents, audio clips, and more.
5. Provision to host, manage and deliver SCORM compliant course packages.

7. Feedback and Learning Journal

An ideal LMS solution allows you to map each employee to a suitable mentor who can monitor the learning progress and provide regular feedback to boost knowledge retention and learning accountability. 

Look for a corporate LMS that enables you to:

1. Assign mentors to leverage specialized knowledge or provide extra support to your learners.
2. Directly map subject matter experts to learners to facilitate personalized learning and guidance.
3. Mentors can share knowledge, provide continuous feedback through learning journals, suggest courses, and monitor the progress of their mentees regularly. 

8. Integration With Other Platforms

The right LMS is one that integrates with:

1. Third-party learning content and delivery platforms (eg: Udemy, Coursera, etc.). The integration will help your employees access internal and external courses and learning materials in one place.
2. Other business applications used by your organization (eg: CRM, ERP, accounting software, HRMS, etc.). The integration will help you access and manage all the information in one place, without juggling multiple applications. 

9. Certification Management

Using a modern LMS like Skill Lake, you can issue custom-designed certificates to learners post course completion.

1. Rewarding employees with course certificates is a great way to motivate learners.
2. Professional certificates also help in validating the legitimacy of the skills acquired by the learner.

Two Key Aspects to Consider When Choosing an LMS

1. Ease of Use (Intuitive Interface)

Intuitiveness of the LMS comes above everything. An LMS with clunky administrative functions faces poor adoption within your organization. So kick the tires on offer before finalizing your choice.

1. Identify ease of use on the front end (what your learners see) as well as on the back end.
2. If your LMS offers you a free trial of the system, use it! Or ask for a live demo and see for yourself.
3. Make sure the LMS is both easy to use and robust with the features you need.
4. The right LMS allows your organization to keep pace with the evolving skilling needs.

2. Security Features

The right LMS offers robust built-in security to safeguard your organization’s content security and ownership, sensitive data, assets, and user information.

Check whether the LMS comes packed with these in-built security measures:

1. Encrypted passwords, walled communities, authenticated resource access, secure profiles and messaging, communications monitoring, secure storage and servers to protect the LMS users and their resources.
2. Measures opted by the LMS provider for fixing/ troubleshooting the reported bugs and errors without extended delays.
3. Understand if the LMS allows your administrators to prevent selected users (such as resigned employees) from logging into the LMS, revoke their access rights, or delete their profiles entirely if necessary. 
4. Review the official privacy policy of the LMS provider to understand their policies and procedures related to the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information gathered from visitors and registered users. 

Know the Different Types of LMSs

When you are planning to build and deliver a robust training program using an LMS, you need to consider two things:n

1. The kind of training platform (LMS) you are planning to adopt
2. How you will administer and manage the platform effectively

That said, you need to understand how to choose an LMS and the most common types of it before finalizing your choice.

1. Cloud-Based vs. On Premise LMS

Cloud-based (SaaS) LMS:

In this model, you will typically outsource all the server maintenance and back end IT needs to the LMS provider. Also, you will receive the most current system updates for free.

When can you choose a SaaS model LMS?

1. You want to get started with a low start-up cost, without any license requirement.
2. You need a quick solution to deploy and implement, especially when compared to an installed system.
3. You need a scalable system to quickly add more users without any additional setup, installation, or configuration.
4. You are currently unable to make a large upfront investment.
5. You want to manage your operations within a predictable monthly spend.

On-premise LMS (self-hosted):

An on-premise LMS is hosted on a company’s own server. The server will be managed by the company itself, while the application management activities such as deployment, updates, etc. will be performed by the LMS vendor or the company themselves based on permissions.

In this model, the software licensing comes as a one-time purchase perpetual license or under an annual license renewal plan.

When can you choose an on-premise LMS?

1. You have a large user base and you need to choose a license model that can save money in the long run.
2. You are ready to make a sizeable upfront investment so you can benefit from the long-term savings.
3. Your business operates in a highly regulated industry like healthcare, banking, or finance. Due to security regulations, you need to choose a self-hosted LMS instead of a SaaS model LMS.
4. You have the option to buy an LMS license and install it on your own servers behind your firewall.
5. You want to integrate the LMS tightly with your other systems such as HRMS, ERP, accounting software, etc. 

2. Proprietary vs. Open-Source LMS

Proprietary LMS:

A proprietary LMS is fully owned and managed by your organization. In this model, the software is restricted from any modifications, reverse engineering, or other uses.

A proprietary LMS is a closed-source LMS that comes with license costs per user.

Open-Source LMS:

In the open-source LMS model, the source code is made available for free. The code can be modified without any restrictions. You can update or customize the software depending on your organization’s requirements. 

You’ll still need to invest in setting up, customizing, and maintaining the LMS, though it is free. 

The Cost of a Good LMS

What are the important things to be aware of when considering the cost of a good LMS?

1. Ongoing management costs: How will you administer and manage the LMS? 
2. Internal resource requirements: Do you need a team in place for the LMS to work effectively?
3. Implementation costs: How will the LMS implementation impact your day-to-day business?
4. Onboarding requirements: Who all in your team should learn about the new system?
5. Learning content production: How will you design and implement your training courses? Does the LMS offer an in-built course builder to speed up content development?
6. Ongoing maintenance and support costs: How will you maintain your LMS and offer the necessary support to users and learners?

Once you create an initial outlay of the LMS budget, you need to get buy-in from the right stakeholders.

1. Justify the additional budget needs to the senior management team. 
2. Communicate how the LMS implementation will increase the effectiveness of your training. 
3. Narrate how the potential LMS can boost your growth and increase revenue. 

How to Choose an LMS : 7 Steps to Consider 

A typical LMS selection process starts with skimming through an LMS Buyer’s Guide. Choosing an ideal LMS then involves the following seven steps:

1. Define your needs and purpose: Understand your employee training goals. Plan and define your objectives based on your organization’s training requirements.
2. Identify your challenges: Look at your current learning platforms and training programs. Identify if there are any gaps or shortcomings.
3. Consider the integrations: Keep an idea of the required system integrations in mind.
4. Assess the platform’s scalability: Think about your future requirements. Do you want the LMS to grow with you?
5. Know the LMS benefits: Find out how your organization can benefit from the right LMS choice.
6. Get stakeholder buy-in: Do a training needs analysis internally. Ask all stakeholders involved how they like to learn.
7. Determine your budget: Consider the cost of the LMS and your current budget. Analyze the source of your budget (where it will come from).

Invest in the Right LMS: Get Started on Your Learning Journey

The LMS selection process can become overwhelming, especially with the plenty of choices available in the current market. The first step is to consider your requirements even before exploring any of the options. Once you have a clear picture of what you are looking for in an LMS  you can confidently invest in an LMS best-suited to your needs. It’s always best to quickly check through an ‘How to Choose an LMS’ Guide before investing in one. 

Why Choose Skill Lake for Your Training Needs?

Skill Lake makes life easier for your L&D professionals by enabling them to identify and assess both your individual and organizational training requirements, skill gaps, track progress towards meeting the training objectives, and garner data insights for monitoring and enhancing the training process. 

Some of Skill Lake’s top features are:

1. Built-in tools for content authoring, repurposing, designing, and delivery
2. AI course generator to build speed up course creation and publishing
3. Skills and competency mapping and management
4. Constant mentoring, assessment, and feedback
5. Personalized learning journeys for each employee
6. AI and ML-powered personalized course recommendations
7. Gamifications and customized certifications to motivate learners
8. Blended and dual learning modes (multi-learning modes)
9. Multi-cloud hosting (your own private cloud or public cloud)
10. Mobile learning to facilitate anywhere, anytime learning
11. AR/ VR-based content design and delivery to make your courses more interactive and immersive
12. Integration with third-party learning content and delivery platforms 
13. Manage courses, users, events, trainers, learners, learning groups, and more 

Does choosing an LMS daunting to you? Reach out to our team at Skill Lake. We will be happy to discuss your use case and LMS needs, and guide you in the right direction. 

Wish you the very best of luck in your search for the right training solution. We hope this guide helps you kick start your learning journey with an ideal LMS.