Making the Most of Your Current Learning Management System
If You Can’t Get a New LMS, Get More From the One You Have
It’s rare for large organizations to be completely thrilled with how their Learning Management System (LMS) works. As an LMS and platform selection consultant, I’m frequently called in to help define requirements for a new LMS that will improve things. While this often resolves many problems, it rarely eliminates all of them, and, in some cases, it can even cause new issues. Even setting that concern aside, it’s not easy to get organization support and budget for a new LMS.
For these reasons, I recommend exploring other ways to use your existing LMS more strategically before deciding to select a new one. Here are four areas where your current system may have more to offer than you think.
Look for New Entry Points Into the LMS
If your LMS interface is mostly focused on a to-do list of assigned training, it probably doesn’t provide a good way to organize training into customized learning paths. One way to address this is by using deep links to courses stored within the LMS — an approach that works best if the system also supports single sign-on (SSO). With this setup, tracking still happens within the LMS, while allowing you to use a wide variety of approaches to visually display learning paths, including:
If you need strong capabilities to display learning paths and the ways listed above aren’t sufficient, you might consider adding a Learning Experience Platform (LXP) to support your existing LMS rather than replacing it.
Check if Issues with Assignments are Really Caused by the LMS or By How You Use It
One of the most common complaints I hear is that learners are assigned training they don’t need. This often happens when courses aren’t designed for specific roles and are instead assigned to everyone. However, it can also happen when training is assigned directly to individuals rather than based on their role or skill set. This approach makes it much more difficult to determine whether the correct training is being assigned.
Often an LMS can assign training based on role or skill, but this feature isn’t being used because there isn’t consistent, up-to-date, and accurate data flowing from a Human Resources Information System (HRIS) or a Human Capital Management (HCM) platform into the LMS. Selecting a new LMS won’t resolve this issue.
Verify if the Problem is the LMS or the Training Content
Sometimes, when I talk with stakeholders about why they don’t like their LMS, it turns out the issue isn’t really with the system itself, but rather that they feel the training content in the LMS isn’t helpful. This may be resolved by selecting better off-the-shelf training if the content is generic, or by developing custom training tailored for the organization where warranted.
In other cases, the issue may not be the end content, but the tools used to develop it. If you expect your LMS to provide content authoring tools that compete with third-party tools that are standards-compliant (for example, SCORM or AICC), you’ll most often be disappointed. The e-learning and assessment tools built into an LMS are usually not as strong as those provided by third-party tools such as Articulate Storyline, Articulate Rise, or Adobe Captivate.
Investigate Other Options for Reports
It’s very common for managers to report that they don’t really get the reporting data they would like about the employees who report to them, either individually or in aggregate. If your LMS doesn’t make it easy — or even possible — to create custom reports, check to see if you can export data to an external system that provides reports and dashboards. On the simpler end, this might be exporting data and reformatting it in Excel. With assistance from someone with the right skill set, you may be able to use Power BI or Tableau to convert LMS data into easy-to-interpret reports and dashboards.
So, what does this all mean? It’s not uncommon to wish you could switch to a new system and solve all your problems. However, it’s often better to spend your time investigating how to best use what you have instead of starting over again. If you have other questions about how you might get the most out of your current LMS, you can book time with me here.
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