It really wasn't that long ago that a Learning Management System (LMS) used to be exclusively utilized by large enterprise organizations with thousands of employees. This is because the cost and complexity of these systems was such that only large companies with huge budgets and lots of IT resources could afford to license, deploy, and support them (usually on their own internal servers). Implementations took several months, involved many consultants and people with technical skills, and then usually required at least one full time LMS Administrator to manage and support the system on an ongoing basis.
Meanwhile, small businesses were left to grapple with spreadsheets for tracking and relied primarily on sending their employees out to the local corporate training center to supplement any live on-the-job training. Fast forward to today, where the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has brought with it a level of scalability that allows complex systems (HRIS, LMS, etc.) to be hosted in the cloud and deployed without any IT involvement at all, while simultaneously and significantly reducing the cost to entry for these systems.
Over the last few years, the LMS market has seen the majority of its growth (in terms of first-time LMS adoptions) in the Small & Medium business space. Yes, large organizations continue to switch LMS vendors for various reasons, but small and medium businesses have discovered the many ways in which they can benefit from licensing a SaaS LMS, such as Absorb.
5 Ways a Small or Medium Business Can Benefit from an LMS
1. Save Time and Money by Automating Your Training
It's long been known that replacing your in-person training with self-paced courses can reduce training time and costs by over 60%.We've had clients tell us they've cut their training administration time in half after switching to Absorb from another LMS. Can you imagine how much time you'd save if you don't already have an LMS?
A good LMS will allow you to create learning paths based on job roles and then automate the process of enrolling employees into these learning paths. Wouldn't it be great to know that the minute you add a new learner to your LMS, that person will get an email with their account details and notify them that they've been enrolled in their new hire training programs?
You can also set this up so that learners who have a change in job role can be automatically enrolled in new learning paths. All you need to do is change their job title in the LMS - a process that can also be automated via a simple scheduled data exchange between your payroll system and your LMS. Of course an Administrator can also do this quickly without the need for any integrations. Another benefit to this is that you will never forgot to enroll someone in their required training once you set up the appropriate rules in the system. And it's not at all complicated.
Here's an example: You can see how 8 people meet the criteria of this rule which is "anyone who's job title contains the word "sales" should be enrolled in this course automatically". Rules can be made more complex or left very simple, like this one.
2. Use Your Existing Training Content
Wouldn't it be great to be able to quickly and inexpensively create courses using simple videos and existing documents such as PDFs, product manuals and brochures? This is a great and inexpensive way to get started building out your content in the LMS. Over time, as you update your content, you can choose whether or not you want to make it more interactive and/or use more multimedia.
You can also easily find and purchase off-the-shelf eLearning content that will be compatible with your LMS. Sites like Lynda.com offer huge catalogs of great content on general business skills, software skills, and management topics.
In Absorb, for example, you can create a course using an existing video followed by a PDF brochure, and then add a simple quiz in a matter of minutes. You just click to create a new course, give it a name and description, and then start adding your Learning Objects. Then you can add your enrollment rules and get back to your game of Candy Crush while your employees automatically receive their enrollment notification emails and start their training.
3. Accurate Reports Made Easy = No More Spreadsheets
When the CEO says to you,"I'm meeting with all the managers in 15 minutes, and I need a compliance training report grouped by Department and sorted by Job Code, as well as a report that shows how much we spent on all safety training by department in the last 6 months", wouldn't it be great to know you could pull that together in less than 10 minutes and quickly export it to Excel or PDF?
Better yet, wouldn't it be great to be able to say to your CEO,"Actually, I set those up as automated reports weeks ago. You and the members of the management team have been receiving them weekly via email, but I'd be happy to print off a set of copies in time for your meeting". Using your LMS you should be able to track:
- Your company's Skills Inventory: who has which certifications and/or competencies and if/when they expire
- Who attended which training, where and when (some of which may be a legal requirement)
- Status of people enrolled in self-paced courses
- Who completed assigned tasks that were part of a course
- How people scored on assessments and control what happens if they fail (this also allows you to improve your courses)
- Details on exams and quizzes, so you can make sure you are asking questions in the best way
- Money and time spent on training (by course and/or by employee)
- People's feedback on your course offerings so you can make adjustments
- Bonus: In Absorb you can easily push out surveys and single question polls to gather any info that you want
4. Extend Training to Your Customers and/or Partner Organizations
Once you've got an LMS in place, it makes sense to think about how it can be extended to learners outside your own company. Imagine the impact you can have on things like revenue, customer satisfaction and market share by having a more knowledgeable customer or reseller.
A good LMS will make it veryeasy to set visibility rules on all of your content, so that a learner will only see what they are supposed to see in the system. The reality is you can create simple or very complex rules to ensure that learners see exactly what you want them to see. Reporting filters also ensure that you can easily filter your report results to specific audiences as well.
5. Create an Engaging Information Hub
Now that you've got learners coming to your LMS for mandatory training, take advantage of the situation and give them lots of reasons to come back (and stay longer).
In Absorb you can:
- Create and brand Billboards to promote new content to specific audiences
- Publish News articles or connect to a news/RSS feed
- Engage people in Polls and gain more insight into your audience's interests and needs
- Incentivize and reward learners through Contests
Your LMS can really start to look and feel like a one-stop information hub rather than a portal with a few lonely courses hanging out in there.
Five Key Considerations for a Small or Medium Business When Selecting an LMS
First off, I'm not going to talk about budget. Well okay, maybe a little bit. I think it's a given that you should license software that you can afford, and that different companies have different needs and different budgets. LMS software varies as much in price as it does in quality. As with most products you get what you pay for.
Here are 5 key considerations when evaluating LMS for Small and Medium Businesses:
1. Simplicity of Deployment and Support
Your LMS should be hosted in a secure, scalable environment (e.g. not on a server in a closet somewhere). Make sure your LMS provider is using a reputable hosting company and ask about up-time. We use Amazon Web Services and have a track record of greater than 99.9% uptime.
Your LMS should be simple enough that you shouldn't need any technical skills to get it up and running and to continue to work with it. If your company is very sophisticated with its use of technology, then your may actually have an IT person or Department who may want to get involved to help set up Single Sign On with your network and/or an automated feed from your HR or Payroll System into your LMS. The latter would be used to automatically create and update learner accounts in the LMS, which is not a requirement, but a great bonus if you can do it.
Your LMS should work on a variety of devices: phones, tablets, "phablets", PCs and Macs without the need for any Apps. This is done using "Responsive" design, which automatically adjusts the LMS interface/layout for different screen sizes. It literally means that you do not need to worry whether a learner is on an iPhone or Android phone, for example. Where it gets a little tricky is in ensuring that your content runs on mobile devices. Video is a great format for this and there are many inexpensive tools that you can license to convert PowerPoint presentations (and other material) into mobile friendly courses.
2. Quality of Interface Design
I've seen a lot of LMS products over the years—at one time I was a Sr. LMS Analyst with Brandon Hall Group. If you follow learning technology blogs and reports at all, you will notice that good design has recently become a bit of a hot topic. With over 500 LMS providers in the market (at the time this post was written) that share roughly 90% of the same features, great interface design becomes an increasingly important differentiator.
Let's face it, most of your learners do recognize a good looking website from an ugly one. When they come to work, you don't want to depress them with ugly corporate software. Companies like Apple have really pushed the importance of design from the consumer space into the corporate space.
Here at Absorb, we take great pride in the fact that our LMS always gets lots of compliments for good looks. But it's no surprise; we've spent a lot of time and energy making the user experience and enjoyable one, and trying to ensure that the quality of your brand is reflected throughout. This is even more important once you open up the system to external audiences.
3. Ease of Use This is super important.
The whole point of an LMS is to reduce the effort around learner training assignments and reporting. If your LMS is not easy to use, then you may have just made your life more complicated than it already was. Ease of use is one of the main reasons that companies choose Absorb and making intuitive software is our number one goal.
4. Automation Features
If your organization's training practices are complex enough, mature enough or just busy enough to justify licensing an LMS, then you are going to want to take things further and automate as many processes as possible. The two most obvious opportunities for this are:
- Automating the enrollment of learners into required training courses, bundles or learning paths: This is really important when you have required training for a specific job role, required training for compliance, or desired training for a career path. This is the "low hanging fruit" of LMS ROI.
- Automating reporting: You will find that managers/supervisors inside and outside your organization will typically want to see the same sets of data on a regular basis. Simply create these reports and then schedule them for automated email delivery. No more last minute report requests. Your job description may include "creating training reports" but that doesn't mean you need to be doing it every day.
5. Flexibility
There are a few different considerations when it comes to an LMS and flexibility.
- Flexible Business Rules: make sure it's easy to filter content by audience type, especially around custom data fields that map to how YOU segment your learner audience. E.g. Employee/Partner/Customer/Reseller Type/Job Level
- Flexible Content types: Don't get tied down to one or two proprietary content types for course content. This is one the reasons why we support a huge variety of content from web links, to tasks, to videos, to PDFs, to Quizzes and Exams, to Surveys and of course, industry standard content like Tin Can (XAPI), SCORM and AICC.
- Flexible User access: connect from Phones, Tablets, Phablets, PCs and Macs
So you can see that there are many things to consider and I hope that you have found these tips to be helpful. Please free to try Absorb, or to contact us and we'd be more than happy to discuss your business needs and see how they could be supported using Absorb LMS.
