A Learning Management System (LMS) is an essential platform for organisations to implement an agile, future-proofed eLearning program. Companies need to be prepared to supply quality training content to employees at all levels of business, in addition to their other stakeholders (including customers, suppliers and partners where relevant) as regulations continue to change and the trend of hybrid working becomes more pervasive.
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The reasons for adopting an LMS as the foundation for training
Understanding how an LMS works, along with the different features and potential benefits, is vital before evaluating any system. To help you on this journey, we have compiled an eBook that takes you through this process step-by-step.
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6 Top Tips on how to Select an LMS
Companies are moving to modern, cloud-based Learning Management Systems (LMS) in huge volumes, and the pandemic has only increased that urgency. If you think it looks like a bit of a minefield, some suggestions that will help you to determine and agree on your priorities and find an approach that works for you is contained in our latest ebook.
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Your eLearning Platform
Train your people. Measure results. Drive growth.
Identifying and selecting the right LMS for your organisation can be a challenging task. With our expert systems, industry knowledge, and experience, Tugela People can work in partnership with you to identify a solution that meets your requirements.
As an LMS solution, Tugela People offers TalentLMS – an all-in-one, feature-rich remote learning solution that's suited to organisations of any size - regardless of industry and geographic location, enabling you to implement a training programme that benefits your employees (and other stakeholders, including customers and partners – as appropriate) from one platform. TalentLMS is ideal for any type of training --from onboarding to compliance-- in any industry --from manufacturing to aviation. Like all of the solutions Tugela People offers their clients, TalentLMS is considered the best in breed and highly rated.
TalentLMS has an adaptable pricing model and offers a free ongoing trial, so you can try it out with no risk. The best part is that if you decide to adopt the solution, any work you've done on the system will still be available. Additionally, as part of the free trial, you can also have 14-days complimentary access to TalentLibrary (a collection of ready-made courses with a focus on soft skills created by TalentLMS)
Click here to learn more about TalentLMS
Once we have assessed that TalentLMS is right for your organisation (given your requirements and budget), Tugela People can provide you with a complete support service for your eLearning program. Services include configuration, set up and ongoing support of your LMS, in addition to developing and setting up your company's digital learning content.
To enhance your system capabilities, Tugela People also provides bespoke integration of TalentLMS (over and above the native integrations already offered) into any system that allows API integrations.
Full details of TalentLMS are listed in our brochure. Click on the image below to download your copy:
Tugela People – Your Partner in eLearning
Tugela People provides a complete solution for your Learning needs
eLearning Services
Having a Learning Management System (LMS) is just the start. An LMS provides you with a platform from which to deliver and manage your companies training programs. However, to ensure that the learning delivery is successful, you need to engage your learners through appealing and appropriate content.
Tugela People provides a complete and extensive eLearning service to assist you in producing bespoke learning material that delivers on your desired outcomes and helps to achieve your company goals.
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Post Implementation Support
Ongoing support for your LMS post-implementation ensures that your online training platform is streamlined and continues to meet your organisational requirements. Tugela People provides this as part of our Managed Services offerings.
Click here to learn more about our Managed Services support for TalentLMS
System Integration and HR Process Automation Services
LMS integration with other key business applications allows you to move data between systems to automate tasks and gain access to integrated reporting. It is, therefore, strategic to combine L&D and HR assets to ensure a successful LMS integration with your existing HR systems.
Integrating your LMS with your HR System will enable you to
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- reduce redundant data,
- provide more personalised online training,
- lower the risk of inaccurate user data,
- help to identify trends,
- provide more effective online training analytics,
- improve resource allocation,
- identify top talent, and
- improve online training ROI.
Tugela People provides a full System Integration and HR Process Automation Service.
Click here to learn more about our System Optimisation services
Next Steps
By partnering with Tugela People, you’re assured of the best and most cost-effective LMS, with the confidence that your online learning is professionally implemented and managed.
To discuss your eLearning requirements or book a demo, please get in touch with us on +44(0)1908 030360 or info@tugelapeople.com. Alternatively, complete the ‘Get in touch’ form and a member of our eLearning team will be in contact with you.
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Industry trends towards Learning & Development
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked transformation, collaboration, agility, and innovation in the learning and development industry. Research conducted by Brandon Hall through the end of 2020 paints a picture of shifting priorities and a renewed focus on making learning agile and adaptable to meet the future needs of the business.
Even before the current crisis, changing technologies and new ways of working were disrupting jobs and the skills employees need to do them. Respondents on a recent McKinsey & Company survey expect to see skills gaps as market and technology trends alter organisations’ talent needs.
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What is a Learning Management System?
An LMS is a cloud-based training tool that can be used by any company regardless of size, geographic location, or industry. It can be used to educate, train, and empower every stakeholder of your organisation.
An LMS provides a simple and efficient online training platform, focusing on the effective distribution of training and development resources. Learners can easily access the training courses on any device at a suitable time, paving the way for a conducive, learner-friendly environment. A seamless LMS is easy to use, and the design and structure are intuitive and standardised, and many companies are now adopting an LMS as the foundation for their overall training programs.
Advantages include supported learning, online and blended learning solutions that facilitate and improve upon traditional educational methods. Learning Management software can also save organisations time and money by allowing the easy administration of large amounts of information in a user-friendly, web-based environment.
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Why Consider an LMS
An LMS enables an organisation to create a learning culture through a remote training platform and meet the challenges presented by market and technology developments. Research undertaken and papers published on the subject all highlight the requirement and importance of having an established online training platform.
Adopting an LMS enables an organisation to:
- Drastically improve the long-term efficiency of training and development, removing the need for expenditure on training events, related expenses, and printed materials.
- Accelerate the training process without sacrificing quality. Because it’s cloud-based, your targeted LMS audience can access training on-demand and at their own pace without the need to juggle individual schedules, enabling learners to prioritise their time more effectively. Having instant access to training, users can move at their own speed and navigate through the training according to their individual needs.
- Centralise all training materials; this allows you to scale your training over time, manage your content more easily and oversee everything from user registration, course attendance, and statistics from a centralised dashboard. An LMS addresses the arduous task of organising, updating, developing, evaluating, assigning and distributing a huge variety of training content for different audiences/stakeholders across departments and/or geographies, with additional language requirements where appropriate. Additionally, in the case of a blended learning strategy, it also enables you to have access to readily available content when required, making training more accessible.
- Grow the business and drive engagement by building a culture of continuous learning. An LMS can motivate people to build skills that benefit your organisation and engage learners by making it easy to find courses and identify future roles that might be of interest. An efficient and effective LMS provides key tools in addressing the five areas of talent management that are part of the Chief HR Officers (CHRO) playbook, i.e. finding and hiring the right people, learning and growing, managing and rewarding performance, tailoring the employee experience, and optimising workforce planning and strategy.
- Enhance your people experience to drive retention. An LMS enables organisations to customise their learning pathways and to align them to roles required both now and in the future, helping to improve retention rates.
- Build the skills people need for future roles; An LMS can also enable career advancement with customised learning and credentialing, providing learners with the opportunity to earn transferable credentials and tangible rewards for contributing innovative ideas and digital assets. A recent McKinsey Global Survey highlights the urgent need for reskilling across industries, with respondents saying that skill-building (more than hiring, contracting, or redeploying employees) is the best way to close those gaps.
- Drive increased operating margins. Empowering your workforce with digital skills can help reduce hours spent on manual tasks, minimise errors and, allow more time for innovation, team collaboration and serve to drive growth.
- Unlock top-line growth by providing access to tools that promote efficiency, reducing the cost of service delivery and freeing up time to create revenue growth opportunities.
- Monitor your organisation’s skill-building progress in real-time and generate learning analytics. This can be used to track training performance and ensure that learners are on track with their professional training goals and requirements. Data can also be used to identify the relative success of courses and broader learning and development trends. Activate learning plans that meet diverse needs by individual and/or group and monitor an individual’s progress in real-time. Get insights to make better-informed decisions around workforce initiatives.
- Extend your training to your clients, partners, resellers, vendors, franchisees, or a complex combination of these to enhance product and service knowledge, helping you to strengthen your business and brand.
- Create a potential new revenue stream by extending the LMS outside of the organisation to other stakeholders to whom training content may be relevant and valuable. Often companies can get more from their existing content by marketing it to a wider audience and charging course fees.
The success of implementing an LMS can be measured in many ways. Having the right skills available at the right place and at the right time is key. In addition to this, success can be measured in terms of financial results, company growth and efficiencies, customer satisfaction, employee retention and talent attraction. It can also be measured for its societal impact, with your organisation contributing to the future success of your people.
Adopting an organisational training culture by investing in people and helping them continually develop their skills should be more than training people in what the organisation decides is important. Part of the learning agenda should be based on what the individual chooses to learn about. The role of the company is to continually challenge and develop its people, starting at the top.
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LMS VS Traditional learning
According to recent research undertaken by Fosway, as many as 97% of organisations surveyed are now using ‘virtual classrooms’ (an online environment for delivering training and for learning to take place) to support learning and development. An LMS creates a learner-centric environment, where the learner actively participates in the process of learning and is not just an inactive recipient of information.
Key attributes that differentiate an LMS from traditionally learning include:
- Learner Involvement
An LMS goes beyond routine learning, with built-in quizzes, tests, and interactive tools and elements, ensuring learner involvement in the course. These interactive elements help learners comprehend the concepts well, thereby improving the rates of retention. Engaged learners are motivated, inspired, and willing to invest effort in learning. In other words, they are a dream to teach. Luckily, while there are almost as many barriers to learner engagement as there are benefits, they can be eliminated with a few smart learner engagement strategies. - Gamified learning
According to Gartner, gamification uses game mechanics and experience design to engage digitally and motivate a target audience to achieve their goals (be that of your staff, customers, employees or channel). An LMS that provides a gamified environment becomes more engaging and interactive, enabling learners to complete courses whilst having a fun and interesting learning experience. - Easy Analytics
In addition to delivering a holistic learning experience, an LMS provides good reporting and tracking provisions, enabling better learner management. Each learner’s training path can be tracked, monitored, and reported on, highlighting the need for intervention when required. - Mobile Learning
Being cloud-based, an LMS provides a compatible environment with the new-age learner. Learners can access training remotely from any device, any location and at any time. - Collaborative Learning with Digital Repositories
Adopting an LMS can make learning more collaborative with the integration to tools, such as journals, blogs, wikis, chats, discussion forums, and social media. The easy and intuitive navigation of social and collaboration tools makes the interface more appealing to learners. - Audio/Visual Stimulations
Unlike traditional training methods, LMS brings with it the art of the possible when it comes to integrating audio and visual stimulations into the content, making it far more interactive and engaging.
- Learner Involvement
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The essential attributes of an LMS
To be successful, the learning experience provided by an LMS must be easy and fun to use and require no training beyond set-up to engage with the system.
- A Learner-Centric Experience
The LMS should enable you to tailor the learning experience to each user or user group (such as internal employees, channel partners, customers, and external users), with the ability to assign users to specific groups. This ensures that each user and/or group only has visibility of the appropriate training and information pertinent to them. Branding is another way to create a learner-centric experience. A great LMS will let you brand the interface based on user groups or departments. It also helps keep consistency across your company’s online training presence. - An Intuitive User Experience
The LMS must be easy to navigate, with a clean and modern interface that highlights the important information that users want and need to see, front and centre. When navigation is complicated and users can’t easily find what they need, this can negatively impact training. The interface should be customisable to suit your organisation’s needs and the target audience for your training. - Mobile Capabilities
In line with cloud-based trends, the LMS should, at a minimum, be mobile-responsive, resizing appropriately based on screen size. Some LMS solutions offer mobile apps to make training on the go even more accessible. One of the biggest benefits of these mobile apps is the offline sync feature that can save information and coursework even when a user isn’t connected to a network. - Built-in Reporting
One of the most essential features for system administrators should be reporting. LMS reports will help you prove training Return On Investment (ROI) to stakeholders and executives. Comprehensive reporting also provides specific measurement on training metrics and gauge effectiveness. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that the LMS you select has built-in mechanisms for tracking performance and ROI. Being able to set up and extract these reports without vendor reliance is also an important consideration. - Native Integrations
A great LMS should easily integrate with most major HRIS, CRM, Payroll, Active Directory, and other business systems to make data syncing between departments and job functions easier and provide automation across platforms. This becomes increasingly important for companies who enforce specific training deadlines as a prerequisite for promotion or pay increases. These integrations can come as out-of-the-box integrations or be custom built. The real difference between the two is whether they work with just a few mouse clicks or a custom connector. - Surveys
Survey tools can be used to administer pre-training assessments and post-training evaluations and gain training feedback, significantly improving training effectiveness. The LMS selected should have an integrated survey tool that administrators can use to easily and quickly create reports based on the collected data. - Blended Learning Capabilities
Although the primary focus of an LMS is to provide online training, many organisations still require a blended or Hybrid approach that incorporates instructor-led and on-the-job training. For these organisations, a good LMS will have the tools and capabilities to track online registrations for face-to-face training sessions and to send email and SMS reminders at a minimum. - Regular Updates
To keep up with industry trends and regulatory standards, the LMS provider should be SCORM or xAPI compliant.
- A Learner-Centric Experience