Can Your Business Benefit From a Learning Management System?

Put quite simply, nearly everyone can recognize that any business can benefit from a learning management system. Skeptics of course will say that their company is unique, and that their internal processes are just fine. They will often rely on the “my company is fine like it is” argument.

Okay, I can see where they are coming from. They think that implementing a learning management system is expensive. They will add that the implementation will be met with resistance from their employees. They will finally counter that all of their training records, accreditations, compliance records, and employee training records are handled easily by their human resources department.

Let them take a few hours to request records from the HR department, and then spend time with HR staff seeing the level of effort it takes to pull the requested data. This exercise will show that the manual processes of document storage, data retrieval, and report preparation is labor intensive, quite costly, and full of the potential for error.

Let’s highlight some areas where a properly implemented learning management system will quickly cost justify itself.

Of course the most obvious area where your company can start noticing benefits is just the central repository of training records. Need to know which of your employees have not taken the latest sexual harassment training? With a learning management system you can quickly identify your training short comings and rectify the problem. Your learning management system allows you to drill down to the level of training details you need with little effort.

An area of particular interest to me is the scheduling of training. It can take weeks, even months, for some companies to effectively schedule training for staff that may cross several locations, working on different schedules and with varying deadlines. With an effective learning management system, you can easily schedule training for these employees.  There is no need to have everyone get together at the same time in the same conference room for training, when you can provide an e-learning and e-training based solution. You can ensure that all of your employees get their training at convenient times for their workload.

Another area that is often missed by manual learning management is needs based training.  Many companies require employees to follow specific training paths to ensure a prosperous career path. A learning management system will enable the employee, their manager, and the human resources department to track training based career growth proactively as opposed to reactively when an employee questions why they are not being promoted as they thought.

There are obviously many more benefits of a learning management system.  Each organization will have their own specific needs that can be met in addition to the benefits listed above. The key to recognizing these benefits is identifying company needs and matching them with the learning management system that most closely addresses these needs.