The global pandemic has forced businesses to operate behind closed doors.
Managing distributed teams, driving productivity out of remote employees, and keeping them engaged with the organization have emerged as some of the most pressing challenges for businesses in 2020.
Investing in the professional development of employees is a well known was to show them that their employer is taking care of them.
Not to forget, such an initiative will also provide employees with some much needed assurance of safety at a time when some of the biggest brands are laying off thousands of people.
With that said, many businesses, especially those that fall in the category of small businesses, find the cost of training employees as a deterrent to investing in employee training.
However, if your teams are working from home, you must consider the cost savings your business is able to manage by not paying for the infrastructure costs of operating from an office. A 2018 study revealed that businesses can save $11,000 on an average, for every employee that works from home.
Even if your organization is only able to save half of that number, you are still left with enough to invest in a quality training program.
In order to create a quality training program, you will require the right tools and in an online learning landscape, a learning management system is perhaps the most important tool.
Let us understand what a learning management system is, and why it holds such great importance in providing online training.
What Is A Learning Management System?
A learning management system or LMS is a software designed to administer, track, monitor, share, and manage training content. Modern LMS are based on the cloud and offer incredible accessibility across various devices.
Modern LMS also come loaded with features related to gamification, social learning, and blended learning that are designed to enable learning administrators or business owners to create an immersive experience for their employees
Now that we understand what an LMS is, let see how to pick the right LMS for a small business:
Analyze Training Needs
By analyzing your training needs, you will be able to determine the features you need or don’t need in your learning management system.
Getting an LMS with unnecessary features will only attract a higher price tag and more features may even result in a complex user interface.
Hence, it is wise to first consider your training needs and the features you will require to fulfill these needs.
Consider Technical Expertise
In the case of training for small businesses, training administrators are often individuals that have other core responsibilities. These can be people from your HR teams, management level employees, or even you (the business owner).
Chances are, in most organizations, none of these people are trained instructional designers and have no experience of working with a learning management system.
Hence, it is important to assess the technical capabilities of your team before you get an LMS. Make sure the one you choose offers a user interface that does not require you to first spend time training your team to use the LMS.
Since your learners will also be using the LMS for consuming the training content, it becomes all the more important to choose a LMS that offers an intuitive and easy to understand user interface.
Consider Your Budget
Finally, budget is a pressing concern while making any business decision, and choosing a LMS is no exception.
However, if you have executed the previous two steps right, you must be left with only a handful of options and making a decision should be easy at this stage.
Conclusion
Choosing the right LMS is not a difficult task with the right amount of diligence.
With that said, not choosing the right LMS can prove to be an expensive mistake.
