Training professionals are tasked with delivering a comprehensive set of outcomes–talent retention, customer satisfaction, partner competency, compliance certifications, and onboarding paths, to name a few–so, they require a comprehensive learning tech ecosystem.
The LMS is just one part of this learning technology ecosystem, supporting your training team with the ability to manage eLearning. However, in order to deliver on the complexity of those outcomes, it’s likely you have to use multiple training modalities in order to:
- maximize in-person knowledge transfer from subject matter experts.
- support the professional growth of leaders with self-paced learning.
- reach people working remotely, and from home, with engaging vILT.
- provide opportunities for further exploration with blended learning.
An LMS can capture the self-paced and online learning modalities, but it’s limited (at the very least) in delivering training against your other modalities, which are just as important. How will you, or do you, manage training that needs in-person delivery? Turning to yet another single-solution software isn’t the best answer available.
The LMS Was Designed to Deliver Content, Not Manage Your Training Program
An LMS has limits and gaps, and your team likely spends a lot of time trying to fill in those gaps and cover for those limitations with spreadsheets, manual processes, and a genuine enthusiasm toward wishing learning technology solutions had something better to offer.
Training at the enterprise level is intricate, and historically training software hasn’t been able to keep pace with the evolving complexity of the L&D function.
While your LMS is a valuable piece of your learning tech landscape, it’s the perfect example of training software that was developed for a specific purpose (to serve organizations trying to reach learners in an increasingly digital landscape). Yet, it lacks the ability to support training teams with managing their operations, delivering all modalities, connecting training to business outcomes, and scaling as training is increasingly relied upon to affect change.
Does this all feel familiar?
How Training Software Helps You Create Margin for Strategy
The growing need in the learning tech landscape is for software that drives strategy through efficiency. An LMS is certainly a good step in the right direction because it straddles the line between user experience and the delivery of training content; however, it lacks seamless automation capabilities with the rest of your learning technology stack.
This is important to note because many training teams aren’t even aware that this sort of deep integration and efficiency through automation exists in learning technologies. If the rapid growth of your organization is tasking your training function with adopting new ways to deliver training–new ways of reaching geographically dispersed learners with growth and development opportunities–then connecting the delivery of those modalities with your other critical software could be a game-changer for your team.
