8 key advantages of a Learning Management System

If you’re not currently using a learning management system to manage your company’s training programs, you’re missing out on some significant opportunities for improved efficiency and cost savings. Here’s what you need to know:

What is a learning management system? A learning management system (LMS) is web-based software that can help you administer, document, track and deliver e-learning training programs. It is a framework that streamlines each step of the learning process and can help you meet your training goals. Here are eight key advantages of a learning management system:

Training program creation and management1. It enables you to deploy consistent training to all of your company’s locations as well as its contractors and sub-contractors. If your organization has multiple worksites or locations, the challenges and costs of deploying and updating training materials can multiply quickly. Binders get lost. Materials get misplaced. Instructors get disorganized, or insert their personality or preferences into your painstakingly-designed training programs. The result is inconsistency. A learning management system is the perfect platform to deploy consistent e-learning programs and course evaluations to all of your locations. 2. It serves as a central repository for all training materials, including e-learning courses, forums, wikis, glossaries, surveys, quizzes as well as rich media content, such as video, audio, PowerPoint and Flash files. A learning management system also enables the re-use of learning assets across your organization. If a document is used in multiple courses, the LMS can be configured to only store one instance of it and makes it available to all of the courses that require it. 3. It simplifies version control. One of the big challenges of paper-based training materials is updating them. Someone on the training staff must replace old versions of documents with new ones by hand. If you have multiple jobsites or locations, you need to rely on someone at each location to do this for you. In any case, these program updates can become very labor-intensive. With a LMS, all documents can be stored digitally in a central repository. That means trainees always see the latest version of training program. As soon as you update a program within the LMS, it’s immediately visible to everyone who has the rights to access it. 4. It enables you to create courses and group them into curricula. You can easily define criteria for course completion, plus prerequisites, co-requisites and elective courses for each curriculum. It’s not enough just to create training content - it must be arranged in the proper sequence to optimize learning. A learning management system can help you to simplify this process. 5. You can create user groups by job title, location and other criteria, and can manage trainee enrollment on a self-service or manual basis. Each group of users can have its own set of customized permissions. For example, your operator trainees can have access to one set of curricula and resources, while your contractors can access a separate set of training materials and resources. This gives you tremendous flexibility to deliver customized training solutions that are tailored to the needs of each group of learners.

Reporting6. You can track the progress of learners across multiple departments, operations and locations. Managers and supervisors can login to the LMS to view the progress of employees who report to him or her. As the head of training, you can login to view higher-level reports that are customized to meet your needs. 7. An LMS can provide you with intelligent reports and data mining capabilities. Many learning management systems provide business intelligence tools that enable you to track the progress of your trainees with charts, graphs and intuitive dashboards. In addition, you can look for patterns in the course data that can help you understand where trainees are getting stuck and where training or tests need to be improved. 8. It can help you to meet industry regulatory requirements. If there’s an accident, you can quickly access the operator’s records and verify the training he or she received. Compare that to a paper-based filing system, where specific records can easily get misplaced or can go missing.

Does your company need an LMS? If your company isn’t currently using a learning management system to measure its training programs, perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at this important technology. Please contact us at 800-942-2886 or 262-514-2886, or e-mail us at info@vista-training.com to discuss your training needs. Interested in our training products? See: Silver Series Training Program or Gold Series Training Curricula