Employee training sessions are a pain to both the trainer and the trainee. They involve dozens of hours of preparation, learning and implementation. The work tends to get monotonous for the trainer.
However, with an increasing trend in integration of technology, corporates have started utilizing Learning Management Systems (LMS) to drive employee training programs. And the results speak for themselves. This has had a positive effect on the learning program as a whole.
Shifting your corporate training online has several advantages; trainees can access their course material at any time, there’s better interaction with their instructors and cost reduction in training material.
But what qualifies as the perfect corporate LMS?
A one size fits all is rarely available. After all, every corporate scenario is different and their needs are widespread, sans a few requirements that are common to all.
The requirements that are common to all, can’t be ignored and need to be present to make any LMS suitable for your corporate needs. These are the points we’ll be focusing on.
So, let’s discuss those right away!
A Corporate LMS Should..
#1 Be Accessible, Always!
Heard of the cloud? An LMS needs to be cloud hosted if you want to engage multiple personnel and have them work together. A cloud hosted LMS is definitely the way to go for better employee integration and on demand access to course material.
Shifting your LMS to cloud also takes out the issue of server management; you put that responsibility on the web-host that handles your server, which means more time to work on your core goals.
It’s also easier to move your LMS solution to another host if you want to at a latter stage once its cloud hosted.
#2 Let Members Communicate
Feedback is an experience, and people love talking about theirs. These experiences are considered very valuable in a corporate world. An LMS which can take feedback from employees would help the management a lot.
These inputs from employees are very useful in improving the overall training methodologies used, or for the courses introduced.
Feedback is usually collected in the form of Polls, Surveys or Questionnaire. A suitable LMS should be able to process this feedback and create actionable data for management.
#3 Integrate Well with Other Systems
A Corporate LMS needs to be interoperable with other corporate systems. Data in hosted LMS is always flowing through other company systems.
For example the track records of an employee training may be routed to the Accounting Department to clock the number of hours an employee has worked on a module.
A good LMS would make this task easier and have Data Import/Export modules to get data in and out of these systems in a uniform format. It should also be able to accept data in any format.
#4 Be Fun!
Multimedia is a go to solution for any training course, it has the ability to grab a person’s attention and get them to stay focused throughout the session.
A multimedia integrated training platform must have the ability to process and showcase user created content to trainees.
Multimedia content can be in variety of forms such as Images, Powerpoint Presentations, Videos and more.
#5 Show Progress
Trainees are evaluated on their performance in the training period. But what is the use of any session if there’s no tracking?
Every trainee needs to have a performance report, and generating these automatically is a feature every corporate LMS must have.
Tracking reports not only show trainee performance data, but they also give you an insight as to how your training strategy is faring. This will allow you to tweak your methods and create more impact in your sessions.
#6 Let Admins Sell
It might so happen that the training course you created for your employees turned out to be great content. So much so that they are worth sharing with rest of the community.
You might sell these courses outside your industry (with proper permission of course) so that it benefits a lot more people aspiring to be trained in that very subject, and also hook in potential hires.
With an e-commerce feature built right into your LMS solution, you can do just that with minimal effort.
You can set your own price, market them and process the incoming orders all from within your LMS Dashboard.
#7 Be Convenient
And lastly, saving time is a top priority in any corporate industry. Your corporate network and training platform should reside on different networks for security and performance reasons.
But this again introduces the problem of remembering too many credentials, and increases the load on your IT team.
With a Single Sign On, your trainees can sign into both the corporate & training network with a single credential.
This saves time for your IT department who may need to assist you with certain tasks.
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What’s on your mind?
The above mentioned features were what we think should be a part of any corporate LMS. Of course most of these are already available in many existing LMS solutions, but it’s always good to have more features isn’t it?!
So tell us what features you think should be part of a LMS and we might just include them in this list. Hit the comments right away!
