Do I Need a LMS?
A learning management system (LMS) has become a common fixture in most mid to large businesses. After all, how can a business be expected to track and measure staff skills and set career goals without systems in place to orchestrate tracking and delivery? The focus of most learning management systems has been to create an ecosystem for organizations that manage all aspects of staff training such as current job skills and those needed to ready them for advancement. Skills assessments, career track planning and soft skills training are all standard fare in these products. Typically these products come with a hefty price tag and are deployed on the organization intranet with dedicated staff overseeing it. It is very common for organizations to take months or years just getting their LMS setup and working. One of the common misconceptions we run into at DigitalChalk is that any software or system used to train people is by definition a LMS. We regularly get callers saying something like "I am looking for a LMS and would like to know more about your product". We don't advertise ourselves as a LMS and so in response, our product specialists will dig a little deeper to see if it's a LMS they really need. Often we find that what they are looking for is not a LMS at all and that a simple online training delivery system is a much better solution. If you are looking for a way to deliver online training, ask yourself the following questions to help determine what kind of product you need:
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Who will I be delivering training to?
If the answer is people outside your organization, chances are you won't be able to accomplish your goals with a LMS product. There is going to be too much overhead and features you don't need, such as career planning etc. However, if you are training your own staff, a LMS might be what you need.
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Are you trying to sell your online training?
If so, most LMS products don't have the shopping cart or reporting you need. More importantly, paying customers usually don't have the patience to navigate your system to take a specific class and will leave without buying.
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What is your training ROI (return on investment)?
If implementing a corporate LMS will produce enough cost benefit to justify the five or six figure per year investment? Most companies with less than 200 employees struggle to justify that expense.
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Do you have a lot of "one time" training of volunteers, seasonal workers or contractors that don't need a career pathway, just a quick class on your widget maker? Do you teach courses to students needing industry related continuing education credit?
Delivering online, prerecorded training is ideal for these people. You won't be needing the more complex (and costly) features found in a LMS.
Take a look at your current and future needs for training delivery to avoid buying the wrong product. Most organizations with more than a couple hundred people need to have a LMS product as part of their training strategy and will often use another product like DigitalChalk to deliver training to people outside the organization. By using a hosted training delivery system such as DigitalChalk, you will respond more quickly to your student needs and accomplish your training goals at a significantly lower cost.
