Are you struggling to keep your team consistently updated on the latest processes? Is onboarding anew hire an overwhelming thought? In today's competitive market, fostering a culture of continuous learning and development is not just an option—it's essential. A Learning Management System (LMS) can be your ally in this mission, streamlining the learning process, making it more efficient, measurable, and scalable. Whether you're training new hires, upskilling current employees, or ensuring company-wide knowledge retention, an LMS offers a strategic solution. Let's dive into how an LMS can transform your business by enhancing training efficacy and operational efficiency.
What is a Learning Management System?
A Learning Management System is software used to plan, execute, and assess a specific learning process. It is designed to help businesses deliver educational courses and training programs to their employees.
Key Features of an LMS include:
- Course Management: Allows managers or instructors to create, manage, and deliver course content efficiently. Courses can be developed using video, written articles, and images.
- User Management: Typically, an LMS will allow you to create users for your employees, segment them into groups, and monitor their individual learning paths. You might have groups for sales, production, your online services team, and more.
- Assessments and Testing: Understand where your team members are in their learning journey and test their knowledge retention with quizzes.
- Reporting and Analytics: Provides detailed reports on learner performance, course completion rates, and other metrics. This data is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of training programs and for making informed decisions to improve them.
How an LMS can help your business.
You are probably familiar with industry education programs from PPAI, ASI, and for my print friends, Printing United. If you haven't made these resources a part of your onboarding process, I highly encourage you to do so. We know how complex this industry can be and by investing some of a new team member's time into the content these organizations provide, you're starting off on the right foot.
Similarly, your specific business is complex. Nobody works quite like you. You have unique processes and a unique technology stack. Sometimes we hire in the midst of chaos and do our existing team members a disservice when, amidst the maelstrom, we ask them to train a new hire on those processes and apps. By implementing an LMS you are providing your team with a streamlined way to access the knowledge needed to perform their work.
An LMS can help your distributorship deliver consistent and quality work to your customers. By building and making available a knowledge base to your team, you can ensure that your standard operating procedures are known and followed, resulting in streamlined work, less confusion, and happy customers.
Knowledge Retention
In the rapidly evolving promotional products and print industry, an LMS enhances knowledge retention crucial for maintaining team expertise and operational efficiency. Distributorships can benefit significantly from tailor-made courses specific to their unique needs, such as accounting processes, building and operating a successful program, or even following a specific client's brand guidelines. Updates to courses can be made swiftly in an LMS, ensuring that all team members have access to the most current information.
Interactive learning tools within an LMS, including videos, charts, and other rich media, engage learners, making processes like building an online store or creating product virtuals easier to grasp and retain. These interactive modules are complemented by spaced repetition and microlearning techniques, which help reinforce knowledge through brief, focused segments, ideal for quick skill updates.
Assessment tools in an LMS provide immediate feedback and quizzes, essential for evaluating knowledge retention and addressing misconceptions quickly. Additionally, features such as discussion forums and expert or even peer-led webinars encourage a collaborative learning environment, fostering a community of continuous learning and knowledge sharing.
Knowledge retention is also important when it comes to turnover. Let's face it, sometimes we lose team members who carry a lot of expertise in their heads. When someone decides to leave your team, if that knowledge leaves with them, it can be a recipe for pain. Before starting PromoPilot, I worked with two different distributorships who I continue to care about and wish them nothing but success. For that reason, it was important that I documented as much as I could about the processes and systems that I was involved with. An LMS is exactly the place that sort of information should be cultivated in.
Finally, an LMS not only facilitates efficient training and upskilling in your distributorship, but also ensures that training is directly tied to measurable outcomes in knowledge retention, employee performance, and ultimately, customer satisfaction. This strategic approach to training empowers businesses to stay competitive in a market where technological adeptness and product expertise are key.
Leveraging Automation with an LMS
You might have heard that, at PromoPilot, we're fans of automation. Fortunately many LMS applications include automation features that can assist with enrollment, employee onboarding, continued learning events, and report generation. If your LMS has such features, make the most of your LMS investment by leveraging these at your business.
If your LMS supports no-code automation tools like Zapier, you may be able to get even more automated value from your LMS. For example, automatically notify user groups when a new course or article is published, automatically assign a new employee to a user group when they appear in your HR app, or update a user's status when a pivotal event occurs in another application. Automation within your LMS can significantly enhance both the learning experience for users and the administrative efficiency for managers.
Choosing the Right LMS
Choosing the right LMS for your company can be based on a number of factors including user experience, features and capabilities, available support, and cost. Personally, I have the most experience with Zoho Learn. Learn actually started as a simple wiki product which was great for creating and gathering internal documentation. However, it has grown into a full blown LMS with important features like collaborative editing, version tracking, course generation, and quizzes. They have a generous free plan which you can use to get started or build out with a single department. But paid plans start at $1/mo/user, making Zoho Learn an easy investment.
You may also consider kicking the tires on these popular LMS offerings:
What stands out to me with TalentLMS is that they provide a growing library of ready-made courses that you can leverage with your team. Categories include technology, business skills, sales success and more. This adds a ton of value to TalentLMS's offering. In addition to the ready-made content, you can still build dynamic courses of your own. TalentLMS also has a Zapier integration, right out of the box, to meet your automation needs.Trainual's approach to employee learning can be summarized in four buckets – easy process documentation, engaging training, operations, and accountability. What stands out is their impressive list of built-in integrations with apps you may already be using! Share your content in your internal Slack channels, embed videos with Loom, or add new users when you set up a new employee in Paylocity. There are many more integrations to explore.
Implementing an LMS can be a transformative investment for your dynamic print and promo distributorship. An LMS not only streamlines the delivery and management of training programs but also significantly enhances knowledge retention and employee development through interactive and personalized learning experiences. By embracing the automation capabilities of an LMS, businesses can boost administrative efficiency, enabling them to focus more on the fun (and important) elements of the business rather than routine tasks. As we continue to navigate the complexities of a rapidly evolving marketplace, integrating an LMS will equip your workforce with the necessary skills and knowledge to thrive.
