7 Features to Look For in an Enterprise LMS Solution

Your company is large and ever-expanding, and with that constant growth comes an increase in learning needs.

Whether your learning experiences are microlearning courses delivered on mobile apps for sales teams, compliance training in departments across the country (or globe), or a startup surging in growth, the only effective way to ship training content efficiently is with an enterprise learning management system (LMS). 

In this article, we'll explore seven must-have features for your enterprise LMS and share an RFP template that will make it simple to whittle it down to your final choice.

What is an enterprise LMS?

The right enterprise learning management system allows your growing team to access the information and training they need when they need it. 

Today, a modern and effective LMS solution will empower your team as you look to move the needle on those crucial metrics and prove impact to your stakeholders. An enterprise LMS even empowers your employees’ learning all around the globe, with highly accessible features like mobile learning. 

But, while a quality enterprise LMS opens the door to a better learning experience, the wrong one can stand in the way of learning and impede your company’s growth. For example, integration with your CRM software, like Salesforce, should be seamless and include adaptive API.

If you’re looking to manage your large team successfully, you need an enterprise LMS that can grow alongside your company, provide insights into your learners’ performance, and help foster a collaborative learning experience.

The benefits of an enterprise LMS

A modern extended enterprise LMS will aid your organization in training management, ranging from compliance or customer support training to employee upskilling.

Enterprise learning solutions help your learning and development team meet learners’ training needs and align your learning experiences with the company’s business goals. LMSs do this by streamlining online learning processes such as onboarding, customer training, and content management.

Corporate learning programs are also great for helping you prove a return on investment to make those critical stakeholder conversations on L&D’s impact that much easier. For example, the right solution should empower you to track essential metrics in real-time on user-friendly dashboards. 

The most competitive LMSs are driven by powerful artificial intelligence functionality that speed up the tedious but necessary day-to-day L&D tasks, so you and your team can focus on the crucial tasks that require the human touch. 

7 key features to look for in an enterprise LMS solution

1. Scalability to keep up with future growth

Expanding businesses should implement an LMS system that can support a growing number of employees. At the enterprise level, companies face an even greater demand for quality training.

In smaller startup settings, one-on-one employee training is possible. With an enterprise company, you have too many employees to feasibly train everyone individually. An enterprise LMS is needed to train your large workforce, at scale.

If your LMS cannot support a fast-growing workforce, you’ll likely hit a wall that limits your company’s ability to deploy impactful employee training programs. For example, if your LMS only allows 100 users but you have 1,000 learners, your team members will have to share accounts–which means your learning solution won’t be able to accurately track individual employee engagement or performance.

Think about how many users your learning platform needs to support now and how many employees your company could have in the next five years. To ensure your L&D team can keep its talent up to speed alongside company growth, you need to solidify your organization’s ability to educate and properly train employees.

The right LMS will have ...

Cloud-based LMS platforms make scaling L&D operations the easiest. With a cloud-based LMS platform, all the computing is done on the provider’s end. This means they have more computing capability and storage than you possess on your own, allowing them to scale your user allotment up or down–often instantly.

Cloud-based LMS platforms also typically offer tiered pricing. So, if you want to upgrade your plan, you can quickly pick a higher-tier plan and add more users to your platform. And in the event of downsizing, you’ll also be able to scale your plan back down.

As a cloud-based comprehensive learning platform, 360Learning is able to scale alongside your company’s L&D needs. See how it works with a custom demo.

2. AI-powered tools to grow the skills you need

As a large company, you want an LMS system with powerful automation and AI-powered tools that empower you and your team to work effectively and at pace.

Artificial intelligence and algorithms are being deployed worldwide, and corporate LMS systems are no exception. The most competitive vendors are quickly developing automation functionalities in their solutions to help you and your team work quicker and more efficiently to create training content that makes an impact.

In today’s fast-paced world, you don’t have the time for the manual tasks that many companies are already automating. From speeding up the content creation process and ramping up course enrollment, to auto-tagging and deeper analytics and reporting, AI-powered functionality is necessary for a modern enterprise and its chosen training platform.

The right LMS will have…

Ensure that you look out for features in your chosen enterprise LMS that make it easy for your team to leverage the AI-powered L&D tools in a user-friendly and intuitive way. 

For example, with 360Learning you can automate all your L&D busy work in just a few clicks. AI-powered content creation helps you ramp up your course authoring processes to design engaging learning content in minutes. And L&D-controlled prompts ensure compliance control and alignment of all your eLearning content.

Other automation functionalities will empower you and your team to orchestrate instructor-led and compliance training with automated enrollment, reminder notifications, and comprehensive audit-proof reporting.

3. Reporting and analytics features to track performance at scale

Reporting and analytics help you understand how well your eLearning training programs are performing and whether they’re ultimately working.

In a small company, you might skate by without reporting for a brief period through casual check-ins and conversations at the water cooler. But in an enterprise setting, you have far too many learners to gauge learner sentiment or performance without a real process in place. 

Your training software should deliver in-depth and regularly updated reporting that helps you develop the best L&D programs possible. Here's one example of how we manage reporting in 360Learning:

An enterprise LMS must give you a bird's eye view of essential statistics. Role specific digital upskilling or digital transformation are in the top 3 priorities for training managers in 2023. These require in-depth employee training to achieve successfully. Without reporting and analytics from your LMS, you’ll fail to understand whether your training and efforts to reskill and upskill are working.

An enterprise LMS without reporting and analytics leaves you teaching in the dark.

The right LMS will have ...
You’ll want to find an enterprise LMS that lets you monitor course completion rates, learner progress, participant satisfaction, average course rating, and more.
These different metrics allow you to monitor course performance over time, regardless of your company’s size, and make adjustments where needed. This level of analytics enables you to design training courses that your learners are more likely to enjoy, more likely to engage with, and ultimately more likely to grow from.

4. Gamification capabilities to boost learner engagement

Gamification increases eLearning engagement by giving participants some kind of reward for completing the training. This is especially helpful at large companies, where employees can become complacent, tune out, or simply get lost in the shuffle.

Online courses and training can feel like a slog for some learners. “Knowledge is power” isn’t enough of a motivator for everyone, especially when pressing daily tasks are competing for their attention. Gamification adds a more tangible goal to work toward in the form of a badge, achievement, or leaderboard spot.

And gamification delivers tangible results, too. Studies show that gamification increases the quality of work and the participation rate of learners. Here's how we incorporate gamification into training at 360Learning:

The right LMS will have ...

Gamification is an umbrella term, meaning there are several features considered gamification. Your enterprise LMS platform doesn’t need every gamification feature imaginable, but look for any combination of the following:

• Achievements: Achievements act as a testament to your team’s hard work and give them something tangible to unlock. Find an LMS that lets you set achievements for courses, like first completion, highest score, and so on.
• Leaderboards: Classic leaderboards allow your team to compete for the top spot on a particular course. Pair a leaderboard with an eLearning course that features a quiz over the training material, and you may find your team retaking the course to achieve that top spot.
• Challenge mode: A challenge mode can act as a hard difficulty, allowing your team to try completing a course as quickly and accurately as possible—with only one attempt.

It’s worth noting that you can also gamify actual courses in some cases. If a topic benefits from a scenario, make it an interactive course and turn the entire experience into a choose-your-own-adventure-style game!

Related: 6 Ideas for How L&D Teams Can Use Genially for Interactive Learning

5. Collaborative authoring support to draw from employee expertise

An enterprise LMS with collaborative authoring allows you to involve your entire company in course authorship, speeding up the online training creation process. 

You’ll need to be able to create quality training material faster as your team’s learning demand increases. And as your team grows, it will become more and more likely that you have experts on specific topics hiding right underneath your nose.

Without collaborative authoring support, the onus of creating courses falls on you and the rest of the L&D team. At best, this means you’re spending more time than you should on course creation. At worst, you’re creating courses on niche topics that miss the mark, all while an expert sits at a desk missing out on a valuable opportunity to help co-author a course on that subject.

Collaborative authoring support democratizes the learning process, giving your entire company the opportunity to take part in the creation of training. This takes some of the work of meeting training needs off your plate, gives others a chance to share knowledge, and can even result in a more learning-oriented environment.

Co-authoring support also implies that the tool is online, bringing peace of mind that all your work is being saved on the cloud and allowing you and your team to work on the courses from any computer or location. Here's an example from 360Learning:

The right LMS will have...
Look for an enterprise LMS with collaborative authoring tools so you can combine your efforts and tag team content with co-authors.

Ideally, an enterprise LMS should make it easy for you to add co-authors to a task. This keeps the course a nice surprise for everyone else, but it allows relevant parties to quickly jump in and add to the course in real-time. Your enterprise LMS should also include a chat,  comment, or forum section so you can communicate with co-authors to ensure everyone’s on the same page.

Your chosen system should also include eCommerce integration so that you can consider selling your compliance training content if it is proven effective and is applicable across your industry, such as HIPPA in healthcare.

6. Skills management for a future-proof workforce

Next, as an enterprise, you will need to keep a sharp eye on the skills market to ensure your company has access to the right skills to react to markets as they change. 

A recent study from Deloitte found that many leading organizations are now applying skills-based models and shifting away from the traditional model based on the job role. As organizations start redefining themselves as skills-based organizations, the right enterprise LMS systems will need to include skills management features.

These features will empower you and your team to elevate your upskilling and reskilling training programs as you help learners develop the skills they need internally, boosting retention and lowering the need to hire externally to fill skills gaps within the company. 

More so, you will need an enterprise LMS that includes functionality to map your learners’ skills through career path modeling and tailored learning paths so you and your team can pinpoint the skills employees need to develop. 

You also want the capability to identify the skills that employees already possess and those skills gaps within your business that you need to close to stay competitive. 

The right LMS will have …

As the world moves towards solving the skills crisis and organizations shift towards skills-based talent management models, your chosen LMS system should include features that help you create a detailed inventory of the skills within your workforce, including AI-powered skills ontology.

Your enterprise LMS solution should empower your skills assessment process, where you gather all the skills that exist within your company and identify the ones you need. Your solution will elevate the process with skills auto-tagging and enable employees to assess the accuracy and relevance of those skills. 

Across large corporate training programs, these AI-powered skills management features are a must-have for an enterprise LMS.

7. Built-in authoring tools provide the all-in-one LMS package

Authoring tools are required for publishing courses in a format that works with your LMS. You’re likely to publish more and more courses as your company’s learning needs grow, making authoring increasingly important.

Finding a suitable authoring tool with a compatible course format for your LMS becomes a challenge without a built-in authoring tool. For example, if you switch LMS platforms, you’ll be left to choose from platforms with integrations that accept your authoring tool’s file outputs, or be forced to get a new LMS and authoring tool altogether.

Some enterprise LMS platforms include built-in authoring tools, which allow you to publish the content in a format natively supported by the LMS. This will enable you to focus on creating quality eLearning and stress less about making sure the content is compatible.

A built-in authoring tool saves you the added cost and time of securing and paying for a third-party authoring tool. And let’s not forget that authoring tool developers can potentially abandon the tool, leaving you high and dry if the tool stops working with your enterprise LMS.

The right LMS will have ...

Plain and simple, you want to find an enterprise LMS with built-in authoring tools. Beyond making it easy to quickly publishing courses, built-in authoring tools should also give you additional insights into your course performance.

For example, 360Learning’s authoring tool being built-in not only makes publishing easier, it also allows you to check course performance via built-in analytics and reporting.

A collaborative learning platform: The best enterprise LMS solution

Securing an enterprise LMS with all the features above sets you up for training success. But, you can take things even further with a learning platform based on collaborative learning.

A collaborative learning platform opens the door to creative collaboration and social learning between any and all members of your team, making it possible for your entire company to work together on course creation, iterate on old courses until they’re updated and even more effective, and meet your company’s ever-increasing learning needs.

360Learning offers a truly complete collaborative learning experience featuring collaborating authoring, globalization capabilities, in-depth reporting and analytics, a robust feedback system, and now, AI-powered skills management.

Download your free ebook on collaborative learning and see for yourself how you can lay the foundation for a more collaborative environment with 360Learning.