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Is your business ready for an LMS?

Resource Business Ready

Is your organisation ready for an LMS?

It’s a question you’ll find on a lot of e-learning sites these days. But it certainly doesn’t involve a simple Q&A style answer.

In part, that’s because of the incredible advances in technology that have been achieved in the LMS space over the past decade or so, enhancing their power and multiplying their capabilities.

In fact, today the question might be better-phrased as “What can your organisation achieve with the right LMS?”

Whereas in times gone by businesses primarily viewed an LMS as a learning tool for employee education and training, today’s sophisticated systems can be configured to meet the challenges of a whole range of business objectives. For example:

Better Communications and Stronger Leadership – Today’s LMS goes way beyond a corporate learning tool; it also acts as a mission critical, enterprise-wide communications channel. Also, since management usually plays an integral role in scoping and implementation – determining content, the types of courses employees take, and monitoring and reporting – these can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses within employee groups, initiate and inform staff, customers and suppliers about new corporate directions and make personnel or work adjustments that benefit the organisation overall.

New Employee Induction – An LMS is perfect for orientating and educating new employees. When new employees complete specific online training courses, they can quickly grasp a business’s culture, policies and expectations. It’s efficient, effective and relatively hassle-free; saving time and money.

Employee Education & Training – An LMS represents a great way for employees to bring themselves up to speed, especially if they are assuming new job roles or moving into new areas, or seeking to improve productivity and performance. It’s also far more cost-effective in the long run compared to, for example, bringing outside instructors into the organisation to provide training. Additionally, modern, online courses developed by engaged executives and industry experts represents an excellent way to learn.

Knowledge Retention & Management– An LMS helps with knowledge, information, techniques, and skill retention, centralizing and securing all in one secure yet easily accessible location.

Compliance & Safety – Many companies and organisations today, particularly those working in fields such as banking and finance, mining and construction and health need to stay compliant and up-to-date with current laws, regulations, and policies. In particular, employees need to be suitably skilled, qualified and certified to avoid the risk of hefty fines, employee injuries or fatalities and public shaming. Staying compliant also helps your business improve on efficiency, giving it a competitive edge.

Cutting Costs & Reducing Overheads: At Seertech, we’ve found that one of the greatest benefits of an LMS – and one that business don’t sometimes fully anticipate – is the extent of the savings it delivers. An LMS means less staff time devoted to training, less administration overheads in terms of compliance, certification etc, and less bureaucracy and record-keeping overall. And these savings are realized across the entire organization.

There are a number of other objectives that can be achieved with an LMS, including the important and fast-growing area of e-commerce, whereby organizations turn the training they already have into a source of revenue. Accordingly, many LMS systems today incorporate extended enterprise capabilities such as easy to use, secure shopping cart and payment processing features to help businesses and educational institutions turn their training content and knowledge capital into a thriving businesses or profit centres.

In a very real sense therefore, an LMS can be used to meet a wide range of business needs, way beyond the baseline requirements of training and educating your workforce. And that list becomes longer each and every year with continuing advances in technology.

This notion of endless possibilities is also the strategy behind Seertech’s iLearning PLUS, an infinitely configurable, integrated platform cleverly designed to align and realign with your business needs as they evolve over time. With iLearning PLUS (brochure download available on seertechsolutions.com/resources) you can utilize your LMS to meet a range of business objectives and also configure and apply it new tasks as they arise.

But once you’ve scoped your objectives, what is actually involved in readying your business?

At Seertech, we specialize in partnering with clients all through the planning and implementation phases, for our experience shows that implementations can fail if the objectives haven’t been fully thought through, or if there’s no buy-in from influential stakeholders.

After many years in business, we believe there are six business elements that need to be aligned ahead of a successful LMS implementation:

Management Engagement – is your C level team engaged and supportive of the project?

Strategy Alignment – does your organisation have an effective and aligned learning and development (L&D) program?

Implementation Program – What strategy and processes will you use to introduce the new system to your workforce and will it be a phased program of implementation?

L&D Resources –  do you have a team with specific learning and development
responsibilities?

Technology – what are the systems you currently use and how will they integrate with a learning management solution?

Learning Culture – has your organisation recognized and embraced the learning opportunity?

Within each of these areas there are many questions to be answered of course, and it is recommended you work with an experienced, knowledgeable team of people to make sure you make the right decisions, right down the line.

At Seertech, we have found over the past 15 years that even with the best technology in the world, clients can still fail to achieve the best possible outcomes without experienced advice and guidance. Our approach is to help you understand what can be achieved using your LMS successfully across your business and, if possible, beyond it, to include partners, channels and customers.

In determining your business readiness for an LMS, our strategic consultants utilise a proven process of planning and implementation to endeavor to:

  • analyse what you are trying to achieve
  • advise on the best approach and provide suggestions about what else could realistically be realized
  • present possible options on how to achieve these goals using the iLearning PLUS LMS
  • modify the LMS solution, if necessary, to facilitate your required outcomes
  • provide ongoing consultation to determine how your learning solution should evolve for maximum benefit

 

Like to know more about whether your business is ready for an LMS, and what a Learning Management System like iLearning PLUS could do for you? Don’t hesitate to contact Seertech on info@seertechsolutions.com or phone +61 2 9368 6700 today for a no obligation chat and presentation.