Advice for Choosing the Right Learning Management Software for Your Business Using learning management software is one of the best ways a company can support its learning and e-learning strategies; providing an integrated system that supports the development, delivery, and administration of organizational learning.
Choosing the right LMS for your business requires organization-wide consideration and planning. There are hundreds of vendors and suppliers with many types of learning management systems, but you have to choose the one that is best for your company's unique requirements. Here are some tips to help you make the right selection. Determine Your Company’s Unique Needs Does your business deploy extended enterprise learning? Or maybe you just need a learning management system for your internal sales force or employees. Determining your business’ unique needs for a learning management system will help you to make careful and informed decisions about the rest of the process.
Begin this process by solidifying and formalizing your sense of the challenges you hope the LMS can address. Examples of types of challenges an LMS can solve include: the need to provide self-service learning for employees and customers, the need to deploy training programs more quickly, or the need to automate training administration processes.
From there, establish priorities and importance of the challenges that need to be handled.
Identify and Describe Your Requirements The next step in choosing an LMS is to prepare a detailed list of the deliverables you must obtain from your learning management system. Start by identifying the specific functional and nonfunctional features your business needs in a learning management system. Examples of functional requirements might be
registration, reporting, incentives/rewards or ability to define user profiles.
Non-functional features may be flexibility and scalability, performance requirements, or global access.
Next, identify your key user roles and their functional requirements. Lay out who is going to be using the LMS, their locations, and the total number of users. This should grow out of your business challenges.
Lastly, determine your technical and interoperability requirements with your IT and HR personnel. These may include architecture and system requirements, integration with existing HR or sales systems, and security requirements.
Assess and Select Vendors When you’re ready to begin researching vendors, be sure to review your requirements and determine the type of functionality you need based on the order of priority. A high level of prioritizing will be your initial criteria for selecting a vendor. Organize your research by the differences in vendors, the quality of their after-sales service and support, and how well they meet your requirements to help to cement your final choice.
Selecting a learning management system that best suits your business puts the power of learning in your company’s fingertips. An LMS provides your business with the added functionality that helps drive innovation and unique learning opportunities for the future.
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