How to Choose the Right LMS for Your Organization

Learning Management Systems (LMS) is a big investment—even beyond monetary—as it can provide any training to anyone and help determine the future of your organization.

People are starting to see how impactful a LMS can be, with the market more-than-doubling it’s value in about five years. While training with a LMS provides many more tools than without, these tools are not just fluff—most have a direct impact on the learning experience. So much so, that even after COVID, 77% of educators said a LMS was vital to their teaching.

Well, how do you pick one?

Picking a LMS

Learning Management Systems can vary in features, user interface, content, offers, authoring tools, and workflows. It could be overwhelming, but if approach it from your needs first instead of trying to decipher what features would fit your needs, the process becomes much easier.

What Do You Want to Teach?

The first thing you must do whenever picking your LMS is determine what will you be using it for. Training employees or volunteers will have different requirements than teaching students will. While there are LMS’s that can flex to either one of these categories, many more are more conducive to specific learning needs. Finding this out shouldn’t be too difficult, think of compliance training or academic. Then investing who and why uses your potential LMS.

What Are Your Needs?

Instead of a list of features and how they can be useful for you, it’ll be more beneficial to think about it the other way around as you go into the market knowing exactly what you need.

Audit Ready

If your organization needs to be audit ready at any given time, whether it be about safety, workplace culture, or procedures then you’ll want a LMS that tracks your learners’ actions. It could be through a log, data points, or by some form of certification, just as long as your LMS can provide proof of learners’ activities.

Maximize Effectiveness

You’ll most likely want to make sure that your training program is as efficient and effective as it can be. The easiest way to do so is by choosing a LMS that has an automated data capturing and reporting tool. For example, CoreAchieve uses Microsoft’s PowerBI, which generates automatic reports based on learners’ performance, completing tedious work for you. With these reports, you can then evaluate how impactful your content is and teak it if need be.

Need Custom Content

You might need unique training materials specifically for your organization. In this case, you’ll want your LMS to have authoring tools. However, even if it does have these tools, it might not be enough. There are so many ways to present information over a LMS like text, video, audio, power points, flash cards, etc. Some allow you to import content from common file formats, some allow you to export that content into common file types, and some, like CoreAchieve, do both.

Give Official Certifications

This is different from auditing, giving certifications can be done for any number of reasons, but most often they are useful for educational, typically nonprofit organizations. In this situation you would want the reporting as mentioned in “Audit Ready” and a certificate generator system. What a certification system does is it generates certificates from a template with the learners’ information upon course completion or allows trusted users in the system to generate certificates on demand. If you need a certification system, then use a LMS with a roles system too. Roles allows you to ensure that certain people will be able to overview certificates and uphold your organization’s credibility.

Looking Professional

Looking professional doesn’t just mean having a clean interface, you would want the interface to reflect your organization too. Naturally, if your organization makes its courses open to people outside of it, you would want to have your branding and identity on the interface itself. This not only makes your organization appear more professional but will also increase your organization’s recognizability. Having a customizable interface may be a small detail, but if you’re investing into something, you’ll want it.

Ease of Managing Learners

How easy it is to manage learners may not mean much if you’ll have a relatively limited pool of people, if you don’t, however, it’ll become one of the most important features for a smooth system. As such, if you work with large groups of learners, you’ll want to make sure that the LMS you pick has ways to group learners and that those groups can be sent messages, enrolled in courses, or easily updated.

Start Without Investing

A Learning Management System is a big investment, but there are ways that you could start with a LMS without any financial commitments. While most of these do come with caveats like limited time or limited features, CoreAchieve doesn’t limit anything besides the number of users. This allows you to explore the system completely before you begin spending any money. You can get started with CoreAchieve free today.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash