Learning Management Systems (LMS) – The Top 10 Tools

Learning management systems provide a great opportunity for companies to engage their employees and track employee training through processes like new hire onboarding, specific skill augmentation, and certifications, to name a few. The type of learning you’d offer your company depends on a number of variables, but overall, you should consider an LMS if you want to do any of the following:

• Improve Career Paths and Increase Retention: Learning management systems provide an excellent opportunity to engage your employees and allow them to improve their skills and grow professionally. When employees feel engaged and see a path for growth, they’re more likely to stay. In fact, Better Buys reports that companies with professional development opportunities like these see a 38% higher retention rate than those that don’t.
• ‍Evolve with Changing Business Needs: If your business is growing rapidly or has pivoted in a way that will require you to train employees on a new system or set of values, for example, an LMS can help make the process more efficient.
• ‍Increase Productivity: When employees can learn new skills and access employee training programs that will make them better at their jobs, they’ll work more efficiently. Not only that, but being able to learn on their own time and at their own pace will allow them to improve their skills without disrupting their normal workflow.

As with any new system, common challenges exist with an LMS. But if you can anticipate and prepare for them, your ramp-up will be much smoother. With that, here are four LMS considerations:

• Define Your Objectives: What is it that you want to achieve with an LMS? Do you want a more efficient onboarding process for new hires? Do you want to improve employee engagement? Do you want your employees to get their necessary certifications or compliance training? Do you want to train employees on work place safety? Do you want to provide leadership training for new managers? Whatever the case may be, you need to be clear on your objectives and the metrics you'll require to be able to tell whether you meet them. This way, you can choose the right LMS for your company — and the right content.
• Content is Key: Your content strategy needs to be as clear as your LMS objectives. If you don’t use the right content, the LMS or content authoring tool will end up being a wasted investment. So figure out what content you need to produce, both in terms of the format (like video vs. PDF vs. course modules vs. slides) and the subject matter. Then designate someone on your team to lead the content creation/execution and make sure the right stakeholders are keyed in— for example, if you’re creating trainings for new hires, you might want to connect with your marketing or communications lead to align on company messaging; that way, your new hires will learn the most accurate way to communicate with their specific audience(s).‍

Encourage Usage: There are two ways for your employees to actually use an LMS:‍

• Evangelize the Platform: Promote the LMS— and the results it will provide— to all employees. Send emails, make an announcement at your next all-staff, meet with individual teams to give demos, and empower managers to get their direct reports on board.‍
• Offer Incentives: In some cases, the incentive is already baked in (i.e. career advancement or a necessary credential). For others, you should consider what type of reward would work best for your employees (gift cards, extra time off, company-wide recognition, a cash bonus, etc.)
• ‍Assess Customer Support: Keep in mind that some training management systems provide better customer support than others. So do your due-diligence ahead of time to see how your platform of choice handles customer issues and questions. In addition to asking a rep on your demo, you might want to ask existing clients or even go “under cover” by reaching out to customer support via phone, email, and/or live chat.

By now, you should have a solid understanding of the benefits that learning management software provides, like increased employee retention, providing opportunities for professional growth and internal mobility, and boosting overall productivity. 

One more to add to the list: recruiting. Give your employer branding the competitive edge it needs to attract the best candidates to your company — by showing potential hires that you provide corporate training opportunities and want to help them succeed and grow within your organization, they’ll most likely accept an offer from your company.

Want to know what type of return you can expect from benefits like increased productivity and retention? Check out our ROI calculators to get an estimate.

How much learning management software costs depends on a number of factors, including the actual vendor you choose as well as how you want to be charged. In other words, do you want to be charged per learner per month or per usage per month? Or, do you want to just pay a one-time fee to access course content or a learning environment in its entirety and in perpetuity? 

While actual pricing varies by platform, here is an idea of what you can expect:

• Per Learner: In most cases, learning platforms will charge between $5-$15 per learner per month. This range accounts for what’s actually included for each learner. Most platforms also charge a setup or installation fee on top of the per learner per month rate.‍
• Per Usage: If you only want to be charged for what your employees are actually using, you can expect to pay wide ranges depending on how much pre packaged content you're using. Similar to the per learner pricing, where your price falls in that range will depend on what’s included.‍
• One-Time Licensing Fee: To purchase a license to install LMS software and use it in perpetuity, you could pay up to $50,000 or more. The licensing fee itself ranges from $500-$20,000 and then there is usually a hefty setup cost as well. Keep in mind that this option is really best suited for larger companies with a dedicated IT staff.
  

As you do your own research, you might see that there are also free options (which are typically the most basic and not very user-friendly). There are also open-source products, which are free in theory, but you need to pay for your own hosting. With more modern SaaS solutions, watch out for free trials. Be sure to discuss pricing packages on your demo so you can get a clear sense for what an LMS will cost your company.

LMS solutions offer a variety of features depending on your needs and budget. You’ll see that some offer a full suite of them (and usually command a higher price as a result), while others are more niche. So once you figure out what kind of online training you want to provide your employees, you’ll be able to pick a vendor that meets your needs. 

Generally speaking, learning management systems offer some or all of the following LMS features:

• Employee Training: Access new hire onboarding materials and employee training courses on everything from business skills, to compliance training, to workplace safety and more. If your industry requires certain certifications, you can administer the relevant tests to get your employees properly certified.‍
• Content Library: Many learning management systems have ready-made educational content that you can use for your company. Such content includes (but is not limited to) slides, videos and animations, PDFs, course modules, even gamification.  Many of these will be specific to a given set of roles, industries or levels in the company (for example, sales training or management training).
• Content Development: If you want a learning experience that’s tailored to your specific company, you can use templates to create your own materials. ‍
• Synchronous & Asynchronous Learning: You can decide if you want to provide learning opportunities in real-time (synchronous) or allow your employees to access on their own time (asynchronous). ‍
• Mobile learning: Depending on the LMS, your employees can get complete course/learning access from mobile devices, allowing them to learn anytime, anywhere.

Demos are a great opportunity for you to see how an LMS works and ask questions before you actually invest. To get the most out of your demo, make sure to ask the following questions:

General questions to ask on any demo:

• How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack and therefore what integrations do I need?
• How will others in the organization use this solution?
• What are the key features I want to ask about?
• What are the things that would make me nervous about investing in this sort of solution?
  

Questions specific to learning management systems:

• Do you provide a library of training content or will we have to create our own? ‍
• What type of content do you support and/or deliver?
• Is gamification built in, and if so, what kinds?
• Do you offer employee incentives/rewards for using the platform?
• How many team members can your solution support per company?
• Does your solution provide a training log, training records, and other sort of reports?
• To which extent is your platform customizable?
• What are you doing to ensure accessibility and inclusivity in online learning?
• Does your solution provide video conferencing for instructor-led training and collaborative learning?
• How do some of your features promote social learning?

Using an LMS will most likely require a team of stakeholders from across the company. This includes executive management (for buy-in), IT (for tech integrations), HR/People Ops (for learning content), team leads (to encourage usage), etc. It goes without saying, then, that you’ll need to regularly communicate so everyone is on the same page in terms of what needs to get done, who needs to do it, and when it should be completed. You can get a general idea of all of this during your demos, so make sure to ask about all things implementation — and see if they offer on-site or virtual trainings.

Additionally, you need to focus on these key elements:

• Content Management: Figure out the type of content you need, who is going to run point, and how you will manage updates as needed.‍
• Rollout: Create a rollout strategy to introduce the platform to your employees and encourage usage. Make sure stakeholders especially are clued in so they can communicate the right messaging, incentives, etc. to their direct reports.‍
• Monitor Usage: Regularly check usage data to see how many employees are engaging with the content, whether courses have been completed fully, if there are any user-experience or functionality issues, etc. Depending on your findings, you may need to make adjustments to your content or rollout plans.

What does LMS mean? ‍

LMS means learning management system, although some people also use learning management software. ‍

What does a learning management system do? ‍

Learning management systems allow your business to train new employees and teams on a variety of skills and topics. An LMS platform is typically used to efficiently onboard new hires and keep employees engaged, leading to increased productivity and higher retention rates.‍

How do you use a learning management system? ‍

You use a learning management system to provide numerous functions for employees, including efficient and effective onboarding, skill augmentation, certifications and incentive-based learning. In addition, employers can use an LMS to track employee progress and performance.

What features should a learning management system have?‍

A learning management system can have the following features:

• Administrative suite for instructors and managers
• Engaging training modules
• Tracking and reporting
• Course creation tools
• Evaluations
• Gamification
• Messaging capabilities
• Video Conferencing
• Certifications
• Calendar management
• Mobile adaptability
• Social learning aspects‍
• Customization
• Multimedia capabilities
• Android & iOS app

What are the advantages of using a learning management system?‍

Using a learning management system can lead to many advantages, such as increased employee retention, professional growth and internal mobility opportunities, and boosted productivity. An LMS can also help recruiting efforts by showing prospective hires that their potential employer wants them to learn, succeed and grow in their organization. The best LMS vendors also offer employee training tracking software within their platforms, which is necessary to measure the effectiveness of the tool. For example, you can see metrics like training sessions per user, time to complete a course, enrollment rates, etc.