10 Benefits of an LMS for Employee Training

Onboarding new employees and keeping your current staff up-to-date on required training courses can take a tremendous amount of time and resources. Discover the ways a centralized learning management system (LMS) can help you prepare new hires for their roles and help your staff meet any state-specific or role-specific training requirements.

Learning Management System (LMS) Defined

A Learning Management System expedites, simplifies, and standardizes training and certification processes across an organization. It makes it easy to manage training efficiently by centralizing educational content, which allows for tighter control and widespread accessibility.

An LMS may be a custom solution tailored specifically to your organization’s needs or an out-of-the-box training course accessed through a website.

Explore ten benefits of an LMS for employee training.

1. Centralized Learning

An LMS serves as a repository for all learning materials, ensuring consistent access to training courses across the board. It can host various forms of content, such as text, video, audio, and interactive modules, eliminating the need for physical materials. This can be especially useful for organizations with multiple locations or remote employees.

Centralization reduces the risk of differing instructions or details across the organization, creating a unified source of instructional materials. Centralization can also provide a single, comprehensive record of training compliance.

See it in action

The District of Columbia’s Department of Health Care uses a state-of-the-art health and human services system known as the District of Columbia Access System (DCAS) to deploy programs with case management capabilities. The District needed a centralized solution for employees to access an internal website portal, a Salesforce-based Knowledge Center, and the Learning Management System.

SIMPLE created a custom solution for the District of Columbia Department of Health Care allowing employees to effortlessly access — and move between — all three systems using one single, centralized solution and login.

2. Organized Content

An LMS allows structured and intuitive categorization of training materials. It can group modules by competencies, job roles, departments, or course types. This capability is vital for creating learning paths: a series of courses that build upon one another to provide a comprehensive understanding of a particular topic or skill. Learning paths can guide employees through their development journey, ensuring they obtain the necessary skills in the right order.

See it in action:

When the CA Department of Social Services needed to deploy mandated reporter training based on job roles for mandated reporters in California, SIMPLE organized the content into a general training course for all industries/ roles and user-specific courses for people who work in healthcare, childcare, HR roles, and more. The Mandated Reporter Training solution now makes it possible for a preschool teacher in CA, for example, to access the role-specific training they need, without having to sift through courseware that’s not relevant to their personal job requirements.

3. Accessibility

Utilizing an LMS for training can make synchronous learning (learning that doesn’t happen at the same time for everyone) possible. This means employees can progress through courses at their own pace, which is ideal for accommodating different learning speeds and styles.

An LMS can allow employees mobile access to learning materials during downtime or while traveling, turning potentially unproductive time into opportunities for learning. Taking into consideration different learning styles is an increasingly important concern for companies that are focused on accessibility in the workplace.

4. Consistency

With an LMS, every employee receives the same training materials, regardless of location or timing. This is vital for ensuring that all employees are working from the same base of knowledge, particularly in terms of compliance training, where discrepancies could lead to regulatory breaches. Consistency also supports a unified company culture and approach, as all employees receive the same messaging about company values, policies, and procedures.

5. Tracking and Reporting

An LMS can allow HR employees and admins access to detailed tracking of employee training progress, providing granular data on aspects such as test scores, course progression, time spent on modules, and more. These analytics can be pivotal in understanding the effectiveness of a course, identifying where employees might be struggling, and determining whether the learning objectives have been met.

See it in action

Inspire Brands is the nation’s second largest restaurant company, with more than 650,000 team members stretching across 32,000 restaurants. Restaurants and food service employ 36.2% of teen workers, so Inspire was one of many businesses impacted by California’s recent legislation requiring mandated reporter training for businesses that hire minors.

Inspire turned to SIMPLE’s Mandated Reporting Training courseware to train HR employees. The tracking and reporting functionality of this SIMPLE product allows Inspire’s admins to track training progress across their organization.

6. Multi-Modality Training

Not all training occurs online for organizations. Some companies and organizations need to deliver training across multiple modalities, such as in-person classroom training and online courses. With an LMS, you can roll all modalities of training management into one centralized system, whether you’re managing offline or online training sessions.

See it in action:

The District of Columbia DCAS system training requirements included the ability to offer courses in both online and offline training environments. Administrators and trainers are able to access the system, add training content, track user completion, and schedule in-person training based on user dependencies. With their SIMPLE LMS solution in place, the department can deploy multiple training modalities from one centralized platform.

7. Cost-effective

An LMS eliminates many of the costs associated with traditional, in-person training, such as travel, venue hire, catering, and physical materials. Additionally, the scalability of an LMS means that it can serve an unlimited number of users without significant increases in cost. The return on investment can also be measured through the LMS’s reporting features, offering clear insights into the value gained from the training.

8. Interoperable SCORM Compliant Courseware

SCORM (sharable content object reference model) compliant courseware is a type of courseware or online learning content that is interoperable. Interoperability in software or courseware simply means exchangeable.

When your training program is based on SCORM compliant courseware, that means any SCORM content can be uploaded to any LMS system. If you have an existing LMS in place, for example, you could plug-in SIMPLE’s Mandated Reporter Training courseware into your existing training platform. Or you can utilize a SIMPLE LMS and add additional training content down the road.

9. Scalability

An LMS can easily adapt to changes in the size of the organization, whether through growth or downsizing. New users, courses, and even languages can be added with ease. This flexibility allows the training program to evolve alongside the company, ensuring it remains relevant and effective no matter what changes occur.

10. Personalized Learning Paths

An LMS can provide unique learning paths based on a user’s role, previous training, performance, and career goals. This tailored approach to learning can improve engagement, as employees can see the relevance of their training to their work. It also optimizes learning time, as employees are not required to complete irrelevant training. This personalization can lead to more efficient and effective training, directly contributing to employee performance and development.

Optimize Your Employee Training Program with an LMS

If you are deploying employee training, whether through in-person or online means, an LMS can help you easily consolidate, centralize, deploy and track results. It allows for accessibility considerations, helping employees learn at their own pace. And an LMS allows for the addition of new training courses to be added in the future as your business grows or if state training requirements change.

To find out if SIMPLE’s LMS or courseware products are a good fit for your business needs, request a demo today.