Are you Ready for an LMS?
Many companies begin training their stakeholders in informal ways, such as one-off onboarding demos hosted by the customer success team, or live workshops held virtually for customers and partners. Eventually, as the business grows and the product stabilizes, it becomes clear that it's time to scale education and training efforts and offer on-demand learning opportunities. One of the first statements commonly made at this point is, “We need an LMS!”
But are you actually ready for an LMS, or learning management system?
The capabilities of an LMS
For those not familiar, an LMS or an LXP (learning experience platform), is a platform designed to deliver education at scale. It allows you to create learning experiences using multiple modalities, such as live workshops, interactive e-learning, videos, and assessments, and personalize the delivery to learners based on what you know about them.
Importantly, it allows you to track learner activity and progress, and report on performance metrics. One of the key differences between delivering learning through a learning platform versus another method, such as YouTube, is that you can cater to the individual learner, understand whether they learned from the material, and make personal recommendations for other learning opportunities based on their proficiency level and goals. Non-learning platforms are not designed for this type of personalization and reporting.
Back to the question, are you indeed ready for an LMS? It may be tempting to begin looking for an LMS based on a list of features that you believe are needed, but keep in mind that an LMS is typically a long-term, expensive investment. Once you purchase it, the implementation process immediately kicks off. This means, you need to have a clear strategy for how to best leverage the platform capabilities from day one. Unfortunately, some businesses learn later that their LMS is not well-suited for their needs because they hadn’t thought about long-term growth strategies prior to purchase.
How can you avoid this pitfall, and what should you do before purchasing an LMS? We’ve compiled a checklist to help!
The “LMS Before-You-Buy” Checklist
Create a program strategy
The first step before purchasing and implementing a learning platform should always be to create a program strategy. A program strategy is simply a definition of who you’re educating, why you’re educating them, and what you’re educating them on. For example, you may have a need to scale your customer onboarding initiatives. The program would then target new customers in order to help them reach their goals using your product, quickly. Another program may be targeting partners, in order to raise the bar on partner quality and create a competitive advantage.
If you don’t have a clear program strategy before leveraging an LMS, you may end up disappointed with the results. An LMS cannot magically deliver the right content to the right learner if this is not defined up front. Additionally, a clear program strategy makes it easy to align with your LMS vendor on success metrics, as you’ll be able to tie the learning experience back to your business metrics.
Identify audience segments and personas
As mentioned, one key strength of many learning platforms is personalization, or the ability to deliver relevant and applicable content to an individual based on their goals, prior knowledge, and experience. But, you can only leverage this feature if you’ve defined your audience segments and personas. Segments are the highest level of groupings, such as partners, customers, and employees, typically segmented by what they’ll need to learn by goal. You could then further divide this by types of customers (B2C, B2B) or by customer name, if you train large enterprises. A segmentation strategy is essential before implementing an LMS, as you’ll want a consistent and scalable way of using “groups” (a common term for the feature that segments users).
Personas are different from segments. They define common trends among your learners by their prior experience, motivation, and learning preference. For example, executives from your B2B customer segment, or students interested in learning your product, may be unique personas. Identifying personas will help you narrow in on the most optimal and effective approach to delivering learning material. At minimum, you’ll want to connect your learner audience to learner goals, and tie that back to your business metrics. The LMS will then help you deliver the right learning experiences to the right learners.
Create a content strategy for tagging
Once you define your program and audience strategy, you’ll have good insights into developing a tagging structure for your content. Most learning platforms allow you to tag your content, using whatever taxonomy is relevant to you. It’s an essential feature you’ll want to use for personalization, content governance, and reporting. A common approach is to tag by topic covered, but you’ll want to have a clear content strategy in place before you decide on how to best leverage tags. For example, you may want to tag content by proficiency level, topic, outcome, and/or target persona. Remember to think long-term, not just about the content you have today.
Develop a measurement framework
Learning platforms typically have quite complex reporting capabilities, allowing you to track engagement, consumption, production, assessment, time spent, and a wealth of other metrics. Some platforms even allow you to import your customer and sales data to begin measuring the impact of learning on the bottom line. However, having the ability to pull hundreds of different metrics won’t matter if you don’t have clarity in specifically what you’re measuring to tell which story. For example, if you want to measure the effectiveness of a customer onboarding program, you’ll need to identify your specific content efficacy metric (perhaps an assessment) and connect that to the specific customer metric (such as TTV). You’ll do this for each of your programs so both you and your LMS vendor are aligned on the ROI you’ll want to see over time.
Consider your marketing strategy
As a final step, you’ll want to design a marketing strategy based on your personas. Your marketing strategy should ensure you tell the right people about the right content using language that aligns with their goals and motivations. You’ll also want to think through on-going communications to encourage learning engagement, completion, and re-engagement. This is important because most learning platforms offer communication features, such as emails or nudges. Ensuring your chosen platform can support your marketing efforts will save you frustration in the long run.
Before rushing to invest in an LMS, you should carefully assess your company’s readiness and lay down a strategic foundation. This involves defining clear program strategies tailored to specific educational needs, identifying audience segments and personas to enable effective personalization, and developing content tagging structures aligned with long-term goals. Taking a few weeks to align on this checklist before purchasing an LMS will set you up for a successful implementation that maximizes the platform's potential for scalable and personalized learning experiences.