Your company is large and ever-expanding, and with that constant growth comes an increase in Learning Needs.
The right enterprise learning management system (LMS) allows your growing team to access the information and training they need when they need it. An enterprise LMS even enables learning from around the globe, a must for most enterprise companies. 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.
If you’re looking to successfully manage your large team, you need an enterprise LMS that can grow alongside your company, provide insights into learner performance, and help foster a Collaborative Learning experience. We'll explore seven must-have features for your enterprise LMS, and an RFP template will make it simple to whittle it down to your final choice:
1. Scalability to keep up with future growth
The first feature to look for is rather obvious: As a large company, you need an LMS that can handle a lot of employees. As an enterprise, your team is larger than a startup’s with an even greater demand for quality training. In smaller startup settings, it’s possible to train employees one-on-one and train within teams. With an enterprise company, you have too many employees to feasibly train every single one individually. An enterprise LMS should support your large team in this training endeavor, with the ability to scale as needed.
If your LMS can’t scale well, you’re likely to hit a wall that limits your company’s ability to educate and properly train employees. Let’s say you have 1,000 employees. If your LMS only supports 100 people, your team will have to share accounts. Not only is this inconvenient, but this also means your LMS won’t accurately track participant performance. Imagine trying to fit 100 students in a 10-person classroom. It’s not pretty.
Think about how many users your LMS needs to support now and how many employees your company could have in the next five years. If you run out of LMS accounts and can’t add more, you’re left with the ugly account-sharing scenario from above. Or, you’re forced to change LMS platforms. This is a time-consuming process that could result in the loss of historical course data. (And let’s not forget what a headache it would be to set up hundreds of accounts all over again.)
If your LMS can’t scale well, you’re likely to hit a wall that limits your company’s ability to educate and properly train employees.
The right LMS will have ...
While most LMS platforms technically have the capability to scale, cloud-based LMS platforms make scaling the easiest. With a cloud-based LMS platform, all the computing is done on the provider’s end. This means they likely have more computing capability and storage than what you can offer, allowing them to scale your user allotment up or down.
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 be able to scale your plan back down as well.
As a cloud-based learning platform, 360Learning is able to scale alongside your company’s L&D needs. You can see for yourself with a custom demo.
2. Reporting and analytics features to track performance at scale
Reporting and analytics let you know if your courses are performing well and ultimately working. An enterprise LMS without reporting and analytics essentially leaves you teaching in the dark.
In a small company, you might skate by without reporting or analytics for a brief period through casual check-ins and conversations at the water cooler. But in an enterprise setting, you have far too many employees to accurately gauge sentiment or performance so informally. You need your training software to deliver up-to-date, in-depth reporting that helps you deliver the best learning and development (L&D) opportunities possible. Here's one example of how we manage reporting in 360Learning:
59% of L&D professionals are focusing on reskilling and upskilling right now. Reskilling and upskilling both require in-depth training. 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 essentially leaves you teaching in the dark.
The right LMS will have ...
You’ll want to find an enterprise LMS that lets you monitor things like course completion rate, time to complete, 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 make courses that your employees are more likely to enjoy, more likely to engage with, and ultimately more likely to grow from.
3. Globalization and language support for worldwide growth
As a large company, your team is likely distributed around the globe, or will be at one point in the future. An enterprise LMS should offer robust language support and the ability to translate courses into whatever language the participant chooses.
Without proper globalization and language support, your courses will appear in the language you create them in. As your team diversifies, you’ll be left manually translating each course into any languages spoken by your team. That is, unless your enterprise LMS platform offers a breadth of language support.
Manually translating courses is time-consuming, not to mention costly if you’re using a third-party translation service. This is why you need the right enterprise LMS with the right language support.
The right LMS will have ...
Look for an enterprise LMS that facilitates translating your courses into any languages spoken by your team. It should be easy to keep track of who is translating what, like in the 360Learning platform shown below:
Bonus points if it includes aggregate reporting information by languages, like this:
Keep in mind your team will continue growing, and so will the number of languages spoken by your team. Just because an enterprise LMS supports your team’s languages now doesn’t mean that will be the case after more people join. It’s a good idea to find an LMS with far more language support than you currently need.
Related: 6 L&D Tips for Breaking Down Language Barriers in the Workplace
4. Gamification capabilities to engage a growing team
Gamification—the practice of adding gaming elements to a training or learning experience—makes learning entertaining 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.
Without gamification, online courses and training can feel like a slog for some participants. (“Knowledge is power” isn’t enough of a motivator for everyone, especially when they have pressing daily tasks 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—Deloitte used gamification to cut training time by 50% without hurting the overall learning experience, while others have found 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 give your team the chance to compete for the top spot on a particular course. Pair a leaderboard with a course that features a quiz over the material being taught, 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
Collaborative authoring in an enterprise LMS makes it possible for you to involve your entire company in the process of course authorship, thus speeding up the course creation process. You’ll need to create quality training material faster and faster as your team grows and their learning demand increases. Your company is already large, and as your team grows, it will become more and more likely that you have experts on certain 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 without the ability 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 knowledge share, and can even result in a more learning-oriented environment. And not only this, giving your team co-authorship abilities means courses on job-specific subjects can be easily created by those actually performing the job.
Collaborative authoring support also implies that the tool is online, bringing peace of mind that all your work is being saved on the cloud. This means your coursework is protected in the event of a local hardware outage. It also allows 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 support 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 or comment section so you can communicate with co-authors and ensure everyone’s on the same page.
6. Robust feedback system to keep courses relevant and up-to-date
An enterprise LMS with a robust feedback system gives your team the chance to tell you whether they liked or disliked a course. When feedback’s combined with analytics, you’re able to accurately gauge if your content is on the right track, and more importantly—improve it.
As a small team, you could likely have gotten by without a robust feedback system. After all, it’s easy to quickly interview a handful of employees. But, when you have an enterprise-scale company with hundreds or thousands of employees, messages are quickly lost. This not only makes the task of collecting feedback next to impossible, but it also means the feedback collected is likely scattered and incomplete at best.
A built-in LMS feedback system gives your team the chance to quickly deliver comments and feedback on how the course was. Much like analytics and reporting, this information makes it possible to create courses your team actually wants to take. This is essential when you’re battling an employee engagement rate that hovers in the 30% range.
The right LMS will have ...
Find an enterprise LMS with an easy-to-use feedback system. A comment system, discussion forum, or feedback submission form is ideal, as it allows you to gather in-depth feedback from willing participants and gauge overall sentiment. A numerical or icon-based rating system works well in tandem with comments, as it provides a score for high-level review purposes.
Ultimately, you want to minimize the effort and resistance to leaving feedback. Feedback is never required, so you’re already asking your team to go the extra mile and tell you if a course is working or not. Making this process as easy as possible means more people are likely to do it.
Ultimately, you want to minimize the effort and resistance to leaving feedback.
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.
Without a built-in authoring tool, you need to find an authoring tool that outputs the course in a format compatible with your LMS. This could force you into using an authoring tool you end up not liking but have to use because it outputs in the proper format. Lacking a built-in authoring tool also complicates things if you decide to switch enterprise LMS platforms. If you switch platforms, you’re left choosing only from platforms that accept your authoring tool’s file outputs, or you’re 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 allows you to focus on creating quality courses and stress less about making sure the content’s compatible.
A built-in authoring tool also saves you the added cost and time that comes with securing and paying for a third-party authoring tool. And let’s not forget the authoring tool developers could 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 of the aforementioned features is setting you up for training success. But, you can take things even farther with a learning platform based on Collaborative Learning.
A Collaborative Learning platform opens the door to unparalleled collaboration 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 of course, gamification.
Claim your free ebook on Collaborative Learning and see for yourself how you can lay the foundation for a more collaborative environment with 360Learning.
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