Discover the 11 Benefits of Implementing a Learning Management System (LMS)

Challenging but rewarding. Most L&D leaders would sum up their profession with these three words. 

Let’s focus on the former for a quick second. Do any of these challenges sound familiar: engagement, measuring impact, budget cuts, upskilling, personalized learning, or hybrid working? They all do?

Don’t worry. The good news is you can get to the rewarding part quicker with the right eLearning software application.

A learning management system (LMS) is crucial in developing eLearning courses and facilitating online learning. Implementing an LMS will ramp up your online training and improve your learning strategy. 

However, you might already know that an LMS is what your L&D practice needs, but you want to assess the real value of an investment in the right learning management system. Or perhaps you’re seeking to streamline your workflow.

Either way, we’re here to help.

We've identified the key benefits of an LMS to help you  make an informed decision or convince your business stakeholders that it's time to start making a real impact within your organization. 

But first, let’s take a quick look at the purpose behind the range of LMS solutions out there.

Purpose of a Learning Management System

A learning management system is user-friendly software for creating, managing, and delivering eLearning content.

Learning and development teams use these cloud-based solutions to streamline and enhance their organization's online learning process. This helps them provide engaging learning experiences that improve employees' skills based on their training needs.

Learning management system providers strive to design the best LMS as an essential tool for deploying your online learning strategy with the following primary purposes front of mind:

1. Creating learning content at pace: LMS platforms are developed to empower L&D teams to create in-house eLearning courses without a developer's assistance quickly.

2. Enabling efficient operation of online content management: Comprehensive LMS systems significantly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your course content, both for learners and administrators.

3. Improving the delivery and impact of digital learning: Your LMS solution will give employees easy access to training materials anywhere, on-demand, online or offline, at their own pace. It will also allow you and your team to monitor metrics such as completion rates to ensure that your course materials impact business goals.

4. Streamlining user management: Scale user management effortlessly in fast-moving organizations, by easily adding and removing users to the platform and enrolling them in training.

But these are just the tip of the iceberg because, as you will see, the purpose of an LMS solution also extends to the benefits it brings to your learners and your organization.

So, let’s start exploring the top benefits of an LMS, shall we?

1. Reduced costs

Although the pricing and cost of implementing a learning management system can be a complicated process (and a little daunting), if you choose the right LMS for you and your organization, you can reduce costs in other significant areas.

By implementing the best LMS for your corporate training programs, you can identify cost reductions through streamlined eLearning and administration, eliminating the need for in-person training and reducing travel costs. This can lead to increased return on investment (more on this in a minute).

If you're still concerned about the cost, you could consider using an open-source LMS. However, remember that in this scenario you would still need to invest in setup, programming, and maintenance.

Now, let's dive into the most considerable efficiency you can realize: time.

2. Maximized time

By implementing a learning management system and leveraging eLearning solutions, you and your team can save significant time.

Some LMS features that will speed up your learning and development efforts include automated user management, custom integrations such as SCORM, or generative AI-powered tools such as a question generator, personalized training recommendations, or an authoring tool. 

Saving time can lead to higher productivity and efficiency for you, your team, and your organization. Even better, it can free you up to focus on more impactful learning initiatives.

3. A consolidated approach to learning 

If you're trying to improve competency or provide corporate training, using an LMS can help you and your team standardize the management and distribution of training courses throughout your organization.

Not only does leveraging an LMS platform make it easier to create learning materials, but it also ensures that employees know exactly where to find the eLearning course content they need, when they need to. 

Certain LMSs, particularly those designed for collaborative learning, allow the implementation of decentralized training programs across separate functional teams, while still adhering to internal consistency with your company-wide training tools and guidelines.

4. Tangible return on investment

As an L&D leader, measuring the impact of your learning solutions is essential. 

With an LMS, you and your team can gather data to prove your programs’ return on investment (ROI).

The best LMS software will include functionality for analyzing the impact of your L&D initiatives, helping you with those difficult stakeholder conversations. This allows you to preserve your L&D budget and secure future investments in your learning strategy while also enabling you to upskill and reskill your employees. 

LMSs can gather valuable data such as course completion rates, time taken to finish courses, student satisfaction rates, and learner feedback. Additionally, some LMS platforms can even integrate with your CRM tool to demonstrate a real-time correlation between training programs and increased sales outcomes. For example, 360Learning’s Salesforce integration allows organizations to measure the impact of their sales training with revenue performance.

5. Better employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention

A modern LMS can enhance employee satisfaction and retention rates by nurturing a culture of learning within your organization.

Did you know that companies with a strong learning culture have higher retention rates of 30% to 50%? An LMS will empower you and your team toward this goal by helping you build more robust training programs that attract and retain new employees. 

Employee training engagement is crucial for a thriving company culture. For example, by leveraging the secret to employee training engagement, you can provide valuable learning experiences that positively impact employee satisfaction and engagement.

Organizations can also support a continuous learning culture by using an LMS with social learning features that enable learners to collaborate and engage through discussion forums and peer-to-peer feedback.

6. An upskilled and future-ready workforce 

A recent Gartner survey found that approximately 58% of workers will require new skills to do their jobs successfully. And as every L&D leader knows, supporting people to develop these skills can be a real challenge.

But with an LMS, you and your team can face this challenge head-on to upskill employees and help them become more competent in their roles. Upskilling is a form of employee training that focuses on teaching new skills and knowledge that help employees do their jobs better, and also expand their skill set for career advancement and internal mobility.

The right LMS will empower your team to design and implement learning solutions that address specific skills gaps, utilize internal subject-matter expertise, and leverage collaborative learning. 

7. Develop content faster and more easily

Even if your learning strategy incorporates blended learning, an LMS will provide you and your team with a cloud-based central hub to create, iterate, and deliver courses. 

The best LMSs will include a comprehensive and user-friendly built-in authoring tool to create digital learning courses with a range of options and assessments to meet learner objectives. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping components to make learning content, ranging from modules to corporate training programs. 

Collaborative learning platforms like 360Learning take it a step further with powerful co-authoring tools. These enable you to democratize the learning process, allowing employees to build and share online courses, leave in-course feedback, and make learning experiences more engaging through interactive content like surveys, quizzes, and gamification. 

8. Impactful onboarding experiences

Your organization can increase employee retention by up to 82% with a great employee onboarding program. 

LMS solutions can facilitate a great first impression in the employer-employee relationship. One way to prevent employees from being overwhelmed with information in their onboarding phase is by using microlearning sessions to create brief courses on company culture, values, and OKRs.

A learning management system will help you create an effective onboarding process that:

• Bolsters early retention
• Allows employees to zip through dull tasks
• Fast-tracks productivity
• Builds trust and community
• Strengthens company culture

Leveraging these elements through an LMS, you and your team will create courses that provide employees with all the information they need to quickly and efficiently ramp up into their roles without confusion. 

9. Preserve valuable institutional knowledge

Your company's institutional knowledge is a valuable asset encompassing various areas such as expertise, data, skills, techniques, and much more.

However, if individuals leave the organization or information is siloed in different departments, it can result in the loss of valuable knowledge and cost the company money.

Using an LMS, you can easily create a central record of valuable institutional knowledge that everyone can access and share.

In addition, LMSs powered by collaborative learning can be more helpful in preserving institutional knowledge, as any employee can design courses to record their working methods and capture specific contextual knowledge.

And while we’re on the topic of internal knowledge and expertise…

10. Leverage internal subject-matter expertise

As an L&D leader, you already know your organization's subject-matter experts (SMEs) are one of your greatest assets. What you might not know, however, is how best to collaborate with your SMEs to create great learning experiences.

Using the right learning management system can help you make the most of this expertise to create learning materials that are engaging and current–and fill the employees’ most urgent skill gaps. These SME-developed training programs will equip learners with the information, knowledge, and skills they need to quickly and efficiently complete required tasks. 

Learning content created by fellow team members is also more nuanced and specific to your company than third-party courses would be, making expert-led learning more effective than outsourced training.

11. Economical and practical remote learning

An LMS is an essential tool for facilitating remote employee training and driving significant savings in time and money for your company in the long term.

Using a learning management system, you can provide asynchronous, on-the-job training solutions allowing learners to participate in online training programs from anywhere and on demand. Moreover, you can quickly scale your remote corporate training programs as your company grows.

Your LMS will help you develop practical remote training by helping you source training needs, enable employees to share knowledge, balance asynchronous and synchronous learning, and leverage microlearning, quizzes, and gamification.

Conclusion: the right LMS changes everything

The right learning management system for you will empower your L&D practice to create learning content at pace, access efficient content management, and improve the delivery and impact of your learning solutions. 

And by doing so, you will see long-term benefits that advance your learning strategy and help you create a great learning culture within your organization. 

We hope we’ve helped you in your learning management research journey, and we wish you the best in your LMS implementation. And if you’re curious to see how your organization can benefit from an LMS powered by collaborative learning, our team can walk you through a personalized demo of 360Learning here.