What Is LMS? Plus, the Top Benefits of Learning Management Systems

One of the biggest buzzwords in business technology today is LMS.

The right LMS, or learning management system, has the potential to take your business from good to great.

But what is LMS exactly and what are the benefits that it provides?

In this article, we’ll answer those exact questions.

What is LMS?

First of all, let’s make sure that we understand what an LMS is. LMS stands for Learning Management System. This rather self-explanatory name tells you everything you need to know about LMS.

Firstly, an LMS is all about learning. It’s a way to present educational material to your audience.

Secondly, an LMS has the capacity to manage the educational resources that you deploy. Any educational program will require a method of content delivery management, content updating, and the like. An LMS houses all of that functionality behind one pane of glass.

Last but certainly not least, an LMS systematizes learning. It gives learners structure as they absorb the educational material.

What Are the Applications of an LMS?

So in what scenarios can a business expect to use an LMS?

Well, there are several different ones. First and foremost, if your business centers around education, then you practically must use an LMS if you want to present the material to your target audience effectively.

Secondly, consider the situation when you’re trying to ramp up a new employee. If there is a lot of principles to learn and technical skills to be established before the employee can be truly productive, then an LMS can help to systematize that onboarding process.

Now that you know what a learning management system will do for you, let’s take a closer look at some of the most significant purported benefits of incorporating a learning management system into your company’s tech stack.

Benefit #1: House Learning in One Location

One of the principal benefits of an LMS is housing educational resources in one location. Think about how learning without an LMS occurs. You have some physical reference books on your desk. You’ve got a thousand Chrome tabs open. A YouTube video faintly plays in the background.

Having to toggle between all these different platforms is simply inefficient. An LMS allows you to host all of the educational content in one place. This, in turn, translates into more effective learning.

What’s more, because the content is all in one place your audience will have an easier time motivating themselves to learn. This again will result in better material absorption.

Benefit #2: Track Educational Progress

As we discussed above, one of the principal components of the tri-faceted functionality of an LMS is a systematization of education. This means that the learning audience has a structure for their education.

That structure could take many different forms. It could be gateway quizzes that must be taken in order to access new material. It could be timed readings of certain modules or watchings of certain videos.

Whatever the case may be because the learning happens in a system, it is able to be tracked. You can track the progress of each participant in an LMS.

So how could this benefit your business?

Simple — take the scenario of the onboarding employee. You can track each of your employee’s progress in the LMS to ensure that they are absorbing the material that they need to be learning.

In another application, you could also create entire in-house certifications with your LMS. Completion of this training material could open up additional responsibilities or opportunities for pay raises for employees. Having the ability to track completion would thus be invaluable.

Benefit #3: Improve Compliance

Another key benefit to an LMS is that you can use it to ensure that your organization is compliant with any regulations in the industry. For instance, many companies are required to incorporate security training into their employee onboarding process.

This ensures that employees know how to keep customer data safe.

By putting the security training into an LMS, you can prove employee training procedures whenever audit time rolls around.

Benefit #4: Integrate Social Learning

Depending on the LMS solution that you choose for your business, you could choose to integrate a social aspect to the education process.

For instance, you could create a discussion board where online learners interact with each other. This allows the learners to not only better solidify the material that they absorb, but it also gives them another reason to stay on and visit the platform.

Benefit #5: Train Your Customers

Last but certainly not least, one of the best benefits that an LMS could provide your business is a portal to train your company’s customers.

For instance, consider the situation where a business sells a very complicated technical product. In order to use the product, customers have to receive training. This onboarding process for new customers can be very time-consuming to manage.

An LMS that is set up correctly will allow the customer to learn at their own pace. This reduces the amount of professional services resources that a company needs to implement new customers. In addition, the tracking capacity of an LMS will enable your customer service team to better troubleshoot a customer’s problems if they report difficulties using the platform.

Having an LMS to train customers will also make your organization look that much more professional. You will improve credibility in your industry and have a better look in front of customers if you use an LMS to structure customer training. This, in turn, will improve your word of mouth marketing and could result in additional revenue, making the positive ROI of purchasing an LMS solution a no-brainer.

How Will an LMS Impact Your Business?

There you have it. Now that you know the answer to the question, “what is LMS” and the various benefits that it could provide your business, all that remains is for you to choose the right solution that works with your business.

For more business advice, be sure to check out the rest of the articles available to read on the website before you leave!  See this article on 6 WordPress LMS plugins.