Corporate LMS: Its Role for Enterprises

As of April 2020 (do you remember that period of the most serious coronavirus lockdowns worldwide?), 98% of educational institutions, including schools and universities, decided to move a major part of their courses to online. And even now, when we can observe significant mitigations of all COVID measures, many institutions still offer a lot of remote digital options. But what about corporate learning? Has it been changed under the pressure of lockdowns? And how can employees benefit from what their companies provide them within the aspect of education at the workplace?

We offer you a closer look at how corporate e learning solutions can influence business success in general and each employee in particular. So if you want to understand what benefits you and your team can get thanks to the launch of a custom LMS, this article is for you.

Enterprise LMS market

To begin with, it is interesting to note that in 2019 the volume of the global Corporate Learning Management System (LMS) market was $1776.9 million. And now, this figure is expected to hit $7570 million by 2026 with a CAGR of 22.8% within the period from 2021 to 2026.

The projected growth rate is pretty impressive, but what factors are backing the increasing demand for business learning software?

Among the significant factors pushing this growth, it’s worth mentioning such tendencies as:

• ongoing innovating process of corporate elearning solutions;
• focus on continuous learning at the workplace;
• broad adoption of cloud-based models that allow working with corporate LMS software regardless of time and location;
• the growing trend of working from home (mainly boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic) and the necessity to keep the appropriate quality of enterprise learning;
• the increasing popularity of such trends as enterprise mobility and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

Today solutions of this kind are used by enterprises working in a wide range of industries, including but not limited to banking and finance, manufacturing, software development, logistics, and others. 

The educational courses you can offer to your employees can include information specifically related to your organization and various programs that provide a total overview of the industry, market research, and updates.

Why do enterprises use corporate learning management systems?

Though each enterprise is quite particular, and there can be many individual reasons and factors that encourage them to start using a corporate learning platform, we’ve tried to formulate the most popular reasons for it.

1. The possibility of saving money on traditional training programs usually includes travel costs, meals, accommodation, paper materials, and other expenses. However, with an LMS, the costs associated with corporate learning are composed mainly of development, deployment, support, and maintenance costs. And in total, they are usually lower than all the expenses mentioned above on traditional training sessions, especially considering that you will pay for your elearning software development only once.
2. Employees can study the necessary materials regardless of their location, which also helps you save costs on other paid business trips when people need to travel to another city to participate in a corporate workshop or conference.
3. You can easily monitor the ongoing learning process, track the progress made by the team, introduce changes into your courses practically in real-time, analyze the weakest points in your employees’ knowledge, and detect the most efficient content formats for your team. In other words, you can make the entire process much more result-oriented and productive.
4. As a rule, corporate elearning solutions have special features related to compliance and certification. These features will significantly streamline all the procedures related to these aspects.
5. Many processes can be automated, and your employees can focus more on the vital job responsibilities without conducting onboarding learning sessions and training for newcomers and organizing examinations.
6. With a high quality of corporate learning, you get more chances to reduce employee turnover and increase their satisfaction. Moreover, when employees see that the company is interested in their professional growth and provides good resources, it is evident that they will want to stay at this workplace longer.
7. Your customers will be more satisfied when they will communicate with seasoned experts with excellent professional knowledge. Moreover, you can enrich your corporate training software with some functionality for external audiences (like clients and business partners) to educate them on the aspects related to the peculiarities of your business, your essential products, or services. It will help them better understand what you can offer them.

Corporate LMS software: benefits for employees

Though the arguments for launching a corporate learning platform from an employer’s perspective are already rather weighty, let’s also consider the benefits for workers. Will they also be happy to have an enterprise learning system as a source for getting new knowledge and developing professional skills?

The only disadvantage that we can name if we look at e learning for business from a worker’s perspective is that your management can track your results. It means that if you are not interested in your professional development, your employers will easily find it out when they see the results of your examinations and your zero progress after the course. However, let’s admit that this “disadvantage” is quite controversial, and in the majority of cases, this transparency is not a problem at all.

But what about the benefits?

• Good opportunity to get new knowledge and improve professional skills that can be of great use even if a worker decides to change a workplace;
• Better performance at a workplace thanks to the gained knowledge which may result in a possibility to get a pay rise or a promotion;
• A better understanding of the corporate culture, goals, and principles of work also positively influences engagement and motivation.

Corporate elearning amid and after the COVID-19 pandemic

It is useless to say that coronavirus has affected all aspects of our life. One of the most tangible impacts on corporate learning is the lack of possibility to conduct training sessions offline.

That’s why the essential advantage of e learning for companies is the possibility to continue the educational process from any corner of the world.

Moreover, let’s not forget that the onboarding process is a real challenge when many employees are working from home. When a person comes to a new company, it is always a rather stressful situation. When a person comes to a new company and can’t even communicate with new colleagues because everyone is working from home, the onboarding process is even more challenging. But a well-thought enterprise learning platform can mitigate a negative influence of such a situation.

However, speaking about the role of this kind of software in the post-COVID epoch (let’s hope it will start soon), we should mention the role of business learning software in helping employees get accustomed to new conditions and new realities. 

Critical characteristics of enterprise learning

If you open a list of ready-made solutions for corporate elearning, it may seem that the list is practically endless. Moreover, there are many custom products. And many of them are very different. But what unites them all? Let’s analyze the key characteristics of a modern corporate LMS platform.

• Collaborative learning. Even if you study the materials from home, it doesn’t mean that you can’t collaborate and communicate with your colleagues taking the same course. Many solutions have social features that allow chatting and working together on educational projects and tasks.
• Diversity of content types. Modern e-learning courses usually contain not only texts or videos but also many interactive tasks, schemes, illustrations, presentations, and other forms of content. All of them make the learning process more engaging and fruitful.
• Microlearning. You do not need to spend long hours listening to lectures or reading hundreds of pages to study the necessary information. Many courses today are organized in the form of short lessons, with short videos and checklists.
• Reusable learning content. With LMS software, you can efficiently reuse the content you have created for a previous course and combine different materials repeatedly, which significantly helps save your time and effort.

Closing word

Corporate learning software may vary in functionality and, consequently, in some goals. For example, some solutions of this kind are targeted exclusively at the internal audience, and some others may have subdomains for partners and clients.

If you want to learn more about the most popular features for a corporate LMS, you can read one of our previously published articles where we explained in detail what functionality you could choose to enrich your corporate learning platform. Just remember: when you turn to enterprise software development services, everything depends on your needs. 

If you plan to launch your e-learning platform for your business, but you do not know how to start or already have an idea and now need to find developers who will build this solution for you, Geomotiv is just the right company to work with. We can create advanced software that will bring real value to your business and provide you with professional consultations. In addition, our experts help you to understand your digital needs better. Contact us via the form that is available on our website!