Never heard of an LMS before? Don’t know the importance of investing in the continuous learning and development of your employees?
If you didn’t already know it, people are driven by learning; just take a look at the popularity of unpaid internships. As an employer, you can take advantage of this fact and use it help retain your best employees and even boost productivity. But what if you’re the owner of a small business with an even smaller training department? How will you meet the personalized learning goals of each employee?
Here we look in a little more detail at Learning Management Systems, or LMSs, which are exactly the kind of tool small business owners can use to help their employees get the training and development they crave.
What is an LMS?
Learning Management Systems are a software application that organizations can use to deliver, track and assess educational material for employees. There are various LMS platforms available, and with their help, your small business could create learning that’s scalable, customizable and accessible from anywhere.
How exactly can an LMS help your organization?
Giving you access to all of your training, onboarding, job development and continued learning in one convenient location, you (or your managers) can easily administer content to different employees, groups and course paths.
Here are some other ways that LMS can help you:
- With customized learning
Provided you select a good LMS (and if you work with an outsourced payroll provider, they will be able to recommend and set you up with one), you’ll be able to create your own courses relative to the specific needs of both your business and your employees, and upload all of your own content.
Some LMS’s also enable you to add material from a library of pre-designed courses such as safety videos, sexual harassment training and soft-skill learning.
- By being able to easily measure success
A quality LMS will enable you to easily tell if your training efforts are effective by tracking the progress of each employee.
- By saving you time
Employees are able to work at their own pace with an LMS, and not waste time going over information they’ve already learned or are aware of. With the help of gamification and quizzes, employers can assess the level of an employee’s understanding, and ensure that no important information is missed.
- With continual compliance
LMS’s can be an invaluable tool for helping a business remain compliant with current regulations, and with compliance laws changing on a frequent basis, this can prove incredibly useful. Updating traditional course material can take up a lot of time, but with an LMS, you can quickly and easily add new compliance standards to your online training.
If you use a corporate-wide LMS, you can also ensure that compliance training remains consistent right across your organization, irrespective of location.
Retaining good employees and encouraging them to be more productive is only ever in the best interests of your business, and with an LMS, you can do exactly that. Couple it with an outsourced payroll service that will get employee pay right and paid in a timely manner, and you can give your employees as much chance of wanting to remain with your company, as possible.