Your Learning Management System can be used as a valuable tracking tool, not just for the training and development department but also for employees, managers, and even executives. Most LMS systems provide you with tracking features, but some also include notification and reporting features, so that nothing is lost in the shuffle of a large training initiative or a push to complete required training within a certain time period. Let’s look at some ways you can employ these features.

On the tracking side, your LMS is first a tool for learners. Once they know how to use the system, a learner can log in, determine where he or she is on a career path, an assigned curriculum, or a certification program, and make adjustments for completion. In this way, the LMS data serves as a self-management tool for careers and development. But the employee can also maintain the tracking data to be used as a record when he or she is up for a performance appraisal, merit increase, or promotion.  In addition, if your organization employs required training programs on a regular basis, the employee can also use this record to prove that he or she has completed required training. From this standpoint, the LMS and its data is a retention tool. After all, an employee who can manage his or her own development may be more likely to stay with an organization.

When you input career paths or curricula into the system, you can assign timeframes or completion dates. For example, the curriculum for a level one employee may say that he or she needs to complete a certain core of courses within the first 120 days after employment or promotion into the position. Your LMS can track this and send an appropriate notification to that employee, reminding him or her via email that there is a deliverable coming up. Plus, you can link the employee directly to the login with this notification, making it easy for him or her to complete the intervention or mark it as finished in a timely manner.

On the other side of the notification feature, the LMS can remind managers of important deliverables or dates, as well. Suppose your organization must have certain regulatory or product training completed within a certain amount of time each year. The LMS can send a notification to managers to remind them of the deadline, and the managers can then determine if their employees have completed the training.

Reporting is another important feature for the LMS-and for anyone who uses it, including training and development. Many LMS systems have “point and click” reporting, that allows you custom build a report based on your own selected criteria. From the training administration side, you or your LMS administrator can pull reports that detail course completions, grades, or pass-fails, for any of your training initiatives, including special programs like compliance or new products. Administrative reporting that you may find helpful can include course attendance, course evaluations, location evaluations, and number of completions per course. This data provides you with immediate information on how a particular course, whether online or instructor-led, is being evaluated, as well as how well it is being attended. The conclusions you draw from your reporting may help save the organization money on programs that are not quite on target at a given time.

Your organization’s managers can pull reports for their employees, as well. Typically they can use the same interface you use to pull reports, so that you’re all using the same selection criteria. A manager can pull a report on how individuals or employee groups are progressing on career paths, curricula, or required training. If they have the tools to do it, managers can proactively manage training deadlines, especially for regulatory or required training, which is another good reason why the LMS is so important. On the other hand, managers can use reports just as employees can when it comes to performance appraisal, promotions, coaching, disciplinary actions, and even human resources issues.

If the LMS data is property inputted upon its inception, the tracking, notification, and reporting features can serve as valuable tools for everyone in the organization. Next, let’s look at how your LMS can benefit your external customers.

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.

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

One of the most effective abilities of an LMS relates to your online learning content. Your LMS can help you not only to deliver and manage content, but also to develop it. And it typically does not matter what the source of the content is; most LMS vendors provide pathways for their own content, your internally developed content, and externally licensed content, as well.

First, content development can be an important part of your learning initiative. Suppose you’ve decided to develop your own eLearning content. Without a content authoring tool, provided by and LMS, you’ll have to develop courses in HTML or using another content authoring software, and then package the courses into SCORM-compliant formats. Although this may be a preferred way of doing things, an LCMS that provides content authoring can cut this process down in time and cost. With a content authoring tool, your edited content becomes course-ready as it’s being created in the system. In this way, it also becomes ready to deliver upon completion. In some organizations, both Instructional Designers and Subject Matter Experts have access to content authoring. However you do it, content development via and LCMS allows you to provide rapid deployment for just-in-time initiatives, plus the ability to customize and brand the content to your organization and its various audiences.

Delivery of online content is also a big part of an LMS, and thus a major underpinning of your learning initiatives. First, any externally licensed courseware you have can typically be set up and delivered through your LMS. Without the LMS, participants may access the vendor’s website directly. With the LMS, they are staying “inside” your organization and being funneled almost seamlessly to the external content.

Some LMS vendors may also provide a content library of their own. Generally, content is generic but covers many areas, such as customer service, management, communications, and leadership. You can have appropriate audiences access this content, as well. Plus, any content you have developed internally, whether it is LMS-authored or built outside of the LMS, can be delivered to your audiences via their login. In this way, any associate who has access to the LMS can log in, take courses, bookmark, return, and sign up for other courses. The delivery arm of an LMS is truly indispensable.

Content management is also a major plus with a Learning Management System. Your LMS allows you to decide who gets access to what courses. Then, you can create notifications and reminders to take the courses. For example, certain groups may need certain regulatory training that has to be completed on a deadline. You can have the LMS send notifications at various points throughout the timeline, without bothering associates who do not need that particular course or program. The LMS vendor’s library is also part of content management. You can “open up” selected courses to selected groups, based o their career paths or current positions. Many of these vendor-provided courses can be used as additional training, corrective training, or even professional development.

Content management also includes control over content, even externally licensed content. For example, suppose you’ve decided to develop your own course in place of an externally licensed one. When you’ve got the internally developed course ready to go, you can “turn off” access to the external course. This way, everyone is going to the right course. In terms of internally developed courseware, you can easily take these courses down, edit or change them, and put them back up fairly seamlessly. This also gives you a great ability to update content to keep it fresh, relevant, and appropriate to its audiences. But if it isn’t you can also repurpose content efficiently.

Content development, delivery, and management are a large part of the training organization’s responsibilities. An LMS or LCMS can make these aspects efficient, cost effective, and quick when necessary, so an LMS provides a solid foundation for the content management portion of your learning initiative.

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

A Learning Management System (LMS) can provide tremendous benefits both for the training department and for the organization in general. There are numerous choices for LMS providers, as well as functionalities, so an LMS implementation project can become quite confusing. Just what are the LMS basics and how can a system help your organization?

To start with, let’s discuss what an LMS really is. In basic terms, the LMS is a system that helps you deliver and manage training in numerous formats. One of the first misconceptions about an LMS is that it is used solely for the delivery of online courses. While this is an important component, it is not the only reason to use an LMS. The LMS consists of a few separate parts. First, the management system consists of the tracking and reporting of the organization and individual learning activities. Second, the content authoring system (or LCMS) allows the training department to create and or upload its own in-house or purchased learning content and courses, and the third part is the content and courses themselves.

Why would an organization need an LMS? The tracking feature of most LMS systems is worthwhile in itself. Individuals, their managers, and organizational management can track who has completed what courses for advancement, certifications, compliance, and even human resources concerns. Plus, the record, if backed up properly, will always exist. The LMS tracking can also assist in measurement of training effectiveness by managing evaluations, course completions, and course attendance – this is a tremendous benefit that renders manual tracking obsolete. The LMS content delivery system can deliver training to diverse populations in any Inter- or Intranet accessible location and can even serve as a knowledge repository for policies, procedures, and quick reference guides. The LMS can serve as an “educational counselor” for individual associates, keeping track of their career path and showing them what courses they need to complete in order to move to the next career level.

Along those lines, managers can coach employee development using the information from the LMS. For example, if an employee wants to advance or has specific issues in specific subject areas, the manager can locate appropriate training courses or content and put them in the employee’s learning plan. The manager can also pull transcripts to make sure that learning has been a part of the employee’s development, especially when performance evaluation time arrives. The easiest functions for employees include looking up classroom courses, registering for them, and setting reminders to attend.

Training content is also not limited to employees. Some organizations use their LMS to deliver content to multiple locations as well as partners, clients, and vendors. Access to content is dependent on a pre-assigned security level, so keeping people in the correct subject areas is relatively simple.

There are some potential opportunities to be found with an LMS. Some “vanilla” systems may require extensive customization to suit each organization. When choosing an LMS, it is absolutely necessary to analyze your organization’s business and determine what functions you really need. Customizations can become quite expensive. In addition, choosing a course library is also a potential opportunity. There are many choices out there, from general to specific, so it’s again important to determine what types of content your organization needs before purchasing a library. Along with course libraries comes the ability to create or upload in-house content. Be sure to look at the options for this before selecting a system. Some LMS providers have highly functional content management systems that would allow content designers, instructors, or even subject matter experts to create content that is branded and suitable for immediate delivery. Other systems may require that a graphics designer create the course in a format that is compatible to the LMS and upload it, which creates an extra step between content design and deployment.

But along with potential opportunity comes tremendous benefit to the organization. First, automated tracking and delivery creates efficiency, cost savings, and better reporting. This tracking also makes it easy to cover compliance related bases or to prove that employees received a certain type of training. The self-management features of the LMS, such as career paths and transcripts, can create upward mobility for the employee population as well as higher retention for the organization. Many LMS providers offer a “testing engine” which allows for all testing to occur online, whether the employee attended class online or in a classroom. And some LMS providers even offer the ability for online course participants to collaborate virtually, another great way to engage learners and encourage them to network with their peers across the organization.

Now that you have an idea of the Learning Management System basics, you can select providers that best suit your organization’s needs – and lessen the fear of ultimately making a choice.

Copyright 2009 Bryant Nielson. All Rights Reserved.

Bryant Nielson – Director of Learning & Development – 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 blog at: http://www.BryantNielson.com