If you’re looking to choose a Learning Management System, I am sure that you will be spoilt by choices. But don’t worry as I have got it covered with 6 handpicked practical tips to help in choosing suitable LMS for your organization. You can read the blog here.

According to research conducted by Brandon Hall Group,44% of companies considering replacing their LMS. The research reports also mention that organisation rated their system’s ability to meet future needs as the biggest challenge for their existing LMS.

Today, with the rapid pace of technological development, learning has changed the way it was happening some years back.  This demands the organisation to adapt to the changing needs of modern workplace learning and it includes to take a decision on evaluating your existing learning management system and decide if it can meet the demand for the modern learners.

1. Meet the needs of the deskless workers

42.5% of the global workforce set to be mobile by 2022. The statistics are not about the geographically spread sales team alone. But it also includes the workforce who are working remotely with the organisation. It can even include the contract employees, people working on offsite, and employees who take the benefit of working from home option etc. This challenges the L&D department of every organisation to train the deskless workers. The organisation must ensure that learning contents are easily accessible to the learners and there is no obstacle or barriers in it. This makes training the employees a more tedious process and demands the organisation to evaluate the existing learning management system to identify if it supports new learning techniques like mobile learning.

If your LMS is closer to 10 years old, there are high chances that it doesn’t support mobile learning and will need a replacement or update. With the LMS market growing globally, the modern LMS available in the market today supports mobile learning. The LMS brings extra support by allowing the learners to access the learning content directly through mobile apps. This allows the learners to access the learning content on the go and many of these apps support offline downloads that enable the learner to access the learning content without the internet.

2.Ability to generate detailed learner reports

The LMSs’ of today are powerful and capable enough to provide detailed learner analytics and reports that can be customized to meet the various requirements of the organization. These reports aid in better decision-making opportunities for management. For example, in allocating the budget for the L&D, measuring the progress of the learners, identifying and bridging the learners’ gap etc. The management can use the findings from the report to support better decision making. Also with the modern learners preferring to learn at their convenience and from any device, I recommend choosing an LMS that supports the detailed tracking and report generation from multiple devices.

3. Make it social

Today corporate learning is not limited to the structure of formal learning alone. Thanks to the technological advancements as today the learners have access to high-speed internet, better connectivity and the proliferation of mobile devices ensures that enables anytime, anywhere learning.
For example, social chat apps like WhatsApp, Facebook are popular in many companies where employee training takes place in informal ways. Thus the LMS of today must support social learning capabilities.

Here are some collaboration tools that you can include in your LMS

•Live Chat
•Social Stream
•Groups and forums
•Gamification elements (Using group leaderboard and competition)
•Social Q&A  etc.

4. Enable gamification

There is no doubt that gamification has the capability to bring engagement and interactivity in learning. Hence, to engage the modern workforce with a limited attention span, e-learning gamification is an ideal strategy for workplace training.  Thus I suggest organizations to ensure that the existing LMS supports gamification to make the learning process engaging and fun. The modern LMS supports gamification by including game mechanics like points, badges, leaderboards etc. The learner gets an individual dashboard or profile that shows the progress of his/her learning, points and rewards earned etc. This pumps the engagement level and makes learning an enjoying process.

5. Personalised learning capabilities

The modern workforce consisting of the multigenerational workforce demands the learning content that is more relevant and personalised to meet the requirement. Gone are those days of one size fits for all approach in learning. Today to keep the learner engaged, the L&D department must ensure that they are able to personalize the learning for the employees.
The LMSs’ of today are able to include learner personalisation. For example, the learner can choose a virtual avatar and name it. The LMS also allows the organisation to set various permissions that ensure that learners gain access only to relevant learning content.
With advanced course discovery functions in the LMS, organisations can ensure that learners get access to only the relevant and personalised learning content. For example, the e-learning course tagged only for Salesperson will be discoverable and accessible only to the sales community.

6.Scalability

With organisations increasingly moving the entire corporate training to online, the LMS of today should be scalable in the operations. It should be able to onboard any number of learner without any constraints or crashing. With more e-learning courses uploaded, the organisation needs to ensure that LMS has the capability to host e-learning content of larger size and duration.

7.AI and machine learning capabilities

AI and machine learning are sure to change the way learning happens in the corporate learning environment. With the advancement of AI and machine learning, the modern LMS will help the organisation to meet the demands of the modern workforce in various areas.
For example, including artificial intelligence capabilities in the course discoverability of LMS can help the organisation to automatically tag the e-learning course and ensure that learner get easy access to the relevant learning content

8.User friendliness

In the past years, navigating through the LMS was not an easy task as a majority of them did not have a user-friendly approach, cluttered navigation, slower loading, non-responsive designs etc were a common scene. If you are still running an LMS without a user-friendly approach, I suggest you to seriously consider to replace the LMS as it can derail the learning experience of the modern learners who are increasingly impatient.

9.A Secured platform

With the widespread panic of data theft and hacks and with the stringent rules like GDPR policies etc. It’s time for organisation to check the security of their LMS. With organisations hosting their  learning content, learner details etc on LMS, I suggest you consult your vendor and ensure that all security protocols are in place to ensure the best of security

Here are my 9 handpicked tips to help you chose the best LMS platform for the modern workforce. Feel free to share your suggestion and recommendations using the comment box below