Your LMS can manage various aspects of your training life cycle as well as content. Consider how much manual management is involved with curriculum development and management, career-pathing, certifications, testing, and evaluation. With an LMS, once these items are in place you can allow the system to manage and track all of them. Let’s look at each of these functions a little more closely.

In relation to curricula, the LMS enables you to build curricula based on business unit, position, or other criteria, and then place each curriculum on the system. When someone is hired or moves into a position, he or she will get access to that curriculum. From there, each learner, and his or her manager, can work on completing courses and learning interventions that better prepare them for the job. Some organizations may even have multiple curricula for one person. For example, your organization may require every employee to go through “basic training” in your industry or company. Then, you may have a curriculum that goes with that person’s job or job group. Your LMS helps you manage all of these.

You can also create career paths in addition to curricula. A career path can show a potential candidate the professional and educational development that is needed to prepare for the next level. And the LMS can track and manage that career path, as well. For example, your organization may have positions that require further education, licensing, or internal education before a person can be considered for the job. But along with this comes the ease of management for the learning organization and the stakeholders. For example, if your stakeholder decides to add a new educational requirement or professional development item, you can easily add it to the career path as it currently exists. This is another great example of seamless changes that can be accomplished within your LMS.

Your LMS can track and manage certification programs, as well. This is much like a curriculum but is more targeted within job groups. For example, people in certain jobs may need to be certified to carry out specific duties. Or, you may want to certify for merit increases or job level increases. Whatever the purpose of your certification, you can create the certification “path” on the LMS and track it. In addition, the employee and his or her manager can keep tabs of the certification process, as well. Some LMS systems even issue completion certificates for courses or tasks, which is an added incentive to employees and managers alike.

Testing is another training management function for the LMS. Imagine how much time your learning and development organization spends on recreating, scoring, and recording tests. With the LMS, you can input tests for both OLT and ILT interventions and let the system score and record the score. You can set minimum passing scores that will tell the participant whether he or she is allowed to re-test. The testing engine of an LMS ensures the follow-through of knowledge consistency, that each person is being tested on exactly the same outcomes. In ILT testing, the instructor can easily place participants on computers in the classroom.

But testing goes beyond OLT and ILT. You can also create pre-testing or test-out options using the LMS. For example, some corporate universities offer “test outs” for certain levels of knowledge and experience, much like a college CLEP test. If a learner is able to pass a pre-test, he or she is sometimes exempted from the course or task requirement. If this is the case with your organization, you can create pre-tests and let the system track and score them, just like a post-test.

Finally, your LMS can handle evaluation of training, especially the first few levels. For example, your level one evaluations for both ILT and OLT can be handled via the LMS. When a participant completes a course, he or she is automatically placed into an evaluation. But what about higher level evaluations? You can create them on the LMS and then send participants a notification to go to the evaluation, much like a course notification. This functionality allows you to evaluate learners, supervisors, or colleagues at certain points after the training intervention.

Next, we will examine tracking and reporting via the learning management system.

Copyright 2010 Your Training Edge. All Rights Reserved.

Bryant Nielson – Strategic Alliance & Acquisitions Director at Financial Training Solutions a division of CapitalWave Inc – offers 20+ years of training and talent management for executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Bryant is a trainer, business & leadership coach, and strategic planner for many sales organizations. Bryant’s 27 year business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering. Subscribe to his personal blog at: http://www.BryantNielson.com

In today’s environment, your learning and development department must be many things to many people. Managing that environment may have become difficult, but Learning Management Systems are making all facets of training management more efficient-and easier. In this series, we are going to examine the Learning Management System as the foundation of your training initiative, so let’s look at the basics first.

You may have seen or heard terms relating to learning management, like LMS or LCMS, or content management. To begin with, an LMS is a Learning Management System, while and LCMS is a Learning Content Management System. Both provide virtually the same services with one major exception: content development. An LCMS usually has a content development “engine”, which allows you and your staff to develop eLearning content in the system and have it available for delivery fairly quickly. So what are the available features with Learning Management Systems? Keep in mind, we will discuss each of these features in detail in this series.

One of the main features of an LMS is the ability to deliver online learning interventions to your audiences, wherever they may be. The content you deliver may be your own, developed internally, or it may be outsourced from another vendor, or even outsourced from the LMS vendor. This standard delivery ensures that every learner is seeing the same content, being tested on the same outcomes, and learning in the same environment. Along with this, as we’ve discussed, an LCMS allows you to create content, many times in a rapid development process. This allows you to deliver content quickly when it’s necessary.

An LMS can track training for you, as well. This comes in especially handy when you need to show that a certain audience has attended training, such as regulatory courses. This is also helpful to managers who are interested in their employees’ career paths. Along those lines, your LMS can “store” career paths for different job groups, and assign training and activities to those career paths. So an employee who wants to move from one level to another can manage the educational and development requirements of his or her career directly from the LMS. Plus, your LMS may even be able to remind employees when it’s time to take a class.

An LMS is not limited to online learning, either. Keep in mind that the scheduling and notifications part of your LMS can also be used for instructor-led training. As long as the schedule is inputted into the system, it will be managed. Instructors can typically pull class rosters in advance of the class, record attendance, and even record grades. Imagine the money you can save on materials if instructors can plan fairly accurately ahead of time. You can also manage your facilities using the LMS and its scheduling. For example, you can keep track of each training room, its features, its seating capacity, and its operation via the LMS. If something occurs that makes a room unavailable, you can keep track of this in the LMS.

So who provides LMS and LCMS services? There are numerous vendors out there, including Learn.com, CapitalLMS, GeoLearning, Registrar, Joomla, and Blackboard to name a few. Your choice of LMS provider is going to have much to do with how you want to use your LMS, what costs you’re willing to pay, and what features are available. We won’t discuss doing your due diligence on LMS providers in this series, so it may be wise to put together an advisory committee of your organization’s training personnel, executives who need to buy-in, stakeholders, and audiences in order to come up with a wish list and review vendors. The worst thing you can do is pick a system that is just not going to work for your organization and its learners.

Why is the LMS the foundation of your learning initiative? As you can see, an LMS is a broad-based management tool for your learning and development organization. In our next few discussions, we will elaborate on the major features of LMS Systems and help you to determine how the system can be a major part of your learning initiatives.

Copyright 2010 Your Training Edge. All Rights Reserved.

Bryant Nielson – Strategic Alliance & Acquisitions Director at Financial Training Solutions a division of CapitalWave Inc – offers 20+ years of training and talent management for executives, business owners, and top performing sales executives in taking the leap from the ordinary to extraordinary. Bryant is a trainer, business & leadership coach, and strategic planner for many sales organizations. Bryant’s 27 year business career has been based on his results-oriented style of empowering. Subscribe to his personal blog at: http://www.BryantNielson.com