If you’ve been using a corporate learning management system (LMS), you know it can be a game-changer in planning and delivering online courses. With an exceptional LMS, your compliance training or employee training programs become more engaging and more effective.
But an older-model LMS might not meet your training standards anymore. In fact, if you’re working with an early-model LMS – or you purchased your LMS before your company experienced rapid growth or changed strategic direction – your learning management system may be holding you back.
Here’s how you’ll know whether you can stick with your current corporate LMS solution or need to upgrade to something more capable of meeting your current training requirements.
1. Outdated user interface and experience
Your training audience might not be IT experts, but the average internet user is savvy enough to spot an outdated interface when they see it.
We’ve all been using the internet for decades, so your employees know when a software’s user interface is clunky, poorly designed, or out of style.
The user interface is vital to making the LMS easy to use and simple to navigate. Your employees will use an LMS interface daily, so it must be straightforward and inviting.
The user interface and the user experience (UX/UI) affect learners’ ability to find courses, access training materials, and retain what they’ve learned. Getting lost in a poor interface is frustrating, and as your learners’ annoyance grows, their interest in their training plummets.
An intuitive user interface is a must for successful corporate learning and employee development. If your current LMS doesn’t offer a bright, welcoming, and easy-to-use interface, you should start shopping for a replacement.
Mobile learning is also an increasingly important part of the modern employee training experience, allowing learners to engage with training programs anywhere and anytime it suits them. Your corporate LMS should be compatible with mobile devices for maximum accessibility and learner satisfaction.
2. Limited integration capabilities
Whether you’re offering sales training or customer training programs, you’ll likely want to integrate your corporate LMS with other software you use in day-to-day business operations.
Seamless integration is a basic tenet of superior LMS design, and thoughtfully-designed LMS platforms make integration easy. But you may be working with an LMS that doesn’t prioritize integrations, or worse – a system so old that it’s long stopped integrating with any current software.
Antiquated LMS systems, or those that refuse to play nicely with your HR systems, CRM, or other necessary software, undermine your ability to train effectively. Signs of limited integration include:
- Manual data entry between systems: You shouldn’t need to manually enter data because your LMS should send data seamlessly between itself and your other software. Plus, your LMS vendor should make sure your integrations are working effortlessly. If they start to malfunction, fixing them should be a priority.
- Inability to sync with modern business tools: Preferably, you should have a corporate LMS that can integrate with any software. The best learning management systems make it their business to customize integrations to fit your needs. At the very least, your LMS should integrate with commonly used business tools like Zapier and Salesforce.
Poor integration has consequences. It can affect the efficiency of your workflow and the accuracy of your data. It might even weaken your data security. If your LMS doesn’t support the software integrations you need, you should start looking for another solution for your online training courses.
3. Poor analytics and reporting features
For most business users, analytics and reporting are two of an LMS’s most important features, so it’s always surprising when corporate LMS providers bring disappointing metrics tools to market.
Learning programs thrive on data. The best learning management system is one that allows you to track learner progress, measure data retention, and report on your findings to improve the learning program further. That way, you can deliver online courses that move the needle and enhance employee development at your company.
If your LMS shows these signs of inadequate reporting, it may be time to consider replacing it:
- Limited or no real-time analytics: Real-time analytics are essential for making informed decisions. If you notice low test grades or a drop in attendance, you’ll want to intervene and address any issues your learners are encountering immediately. Without real-time analytics, you may not discover problems in your online courses until it’s too late to fix them.
- Inability to customize reports: Whether you’re presenting to department heads, human resources, or other stakeholders, you need to tailor your learning reports to the audience. Different stakeholders will value different metrics, so offering the same report to every audience limits your ability to accurately analyze and represent learning outcomes.
Innovative tracking and reporting tools are essential to corporate learning management systems. If your corporate LMS only offers ho-hum reporting options and basic metrics measurements, it’s probably time for a new one.
4. Lack of personalization and adaptability
Personalized learning paths can make extended enterprise training more immersive and interesting for your learners.
Each of your learners has a unique learning style, and an exceptional LMS can adapt to meet each one. It may offer blended learning opportunities to trainees who respond well to different learning modes or encourage collaborative learning in students who enjoy a social learning experience.
Online courses work best when they feel tailored and personal rather than generic. If your corporate LMS lacks personalization options, you’ll notice these signs:
- One-size-fits-all content delivery: The right learning solution will offer critical features like personalized learning paths that tailor learning content to each learner.
- No adaptive learning features: If your learning management system is adaptive, it’ll measure learner progress and adjust individual learning paths accordingly. For instance, if a sales team member struggles to pass their leadership training courses,
the adaptive LMS will offer content to support them as they improve their leadership training skills.
Cattle-call learning isn’t motivating. If you want to see your learner engagement and training effectiveness soar, invest in an LMS that prioritizes personalization in the training process.
5. Scalability issues
As your company grows, so will your corporate training programs. You’ll need an LMS that scales with your needs to deliver relevant training content to every employee, whether they require onboarding, compliance training, or on-the-job training for specific skills.
To offer tailored professional development to everyone in your organization, you’ll need an LMS that’s robust enough to handle large files, hundreds or thousands of user profiles, and a growing library of learning content. Plus, you’ll need to know it can continue personalizing learning paths even when user management gets complicated.
If your corporate LMS displays these signs of limited scalability, you should find a new one:
- Performance issues with increasing user load: A growing company can only mean one thing for user management – more of it. If your LMS is already struggling with an expanding user load, it’ll face ongoing performance issues that hamper your learning process and block learners from meeting their online learning goals.
- Limited capacity for content and user expansion: As online learning expands at your organization, you’ll need more storage and bandwidth to expand your content and add more users. Don’t settle for an LMS that limits your user numbers or file storage capacity.
Access to reliable online courses is necessary for learners to expand their skill sets and strive towards positive professional development. Without this, learning continuity suffers, and your company’s long-term growth might follow suit.
6. Inadequate support and maintenance
When it’s 4:45 pm on a Friday, and your learning management system isn’t working correctly, will your current LMS provider take your call?
Not only does inadequate customer support leave you hanging when you need help, but it can also mean the LMS software you use isn’t regularly updated or improved. Watch out for these signs of subpar customer support:
- Slow response times and unresolved issues
- Infrequent updates and bug fixes
- Lack of customer training available to you
You deserve an LMS vendor that always picks up the phone, answers the email, or responds to the chat. Superior learning management systems offer five-star customer service. If you’re not receiving that with your current vendor, it’s time for a new LMS.
7. Non-compliant with industry standards
In the learning industry, standards like SCORM and regulations like GDPR are well-known and almost universally met. An LMS that doesn’t comply is either woefully out of date or willfully ignoring the standards you’re legally required to meet.
Compliance standards and regulations are enforced by legislation, laws, and fines, so a non-compliant LMS could land you in legal trouble. If your learning platform has a history of security vulnerabilities or difficulty meeting regulatory requirements, it’s probably non-compliant.
Take a strict, no-nonsense stance on non-compliance. Using a learning platform that doesn’t meet legal and industry regulations places your company in murky legal waters and at risk of damaging data breaches.
8. Poor content management
Content management is a cornerstone of corporate learning management systems, directly impacting your content’s relevance and learner engagement. So, if your online training platform misses the mark in content updating or organization, you may need a better LMS.
Without good organization, finding the content you need can be frustrating, and when you want to add learning modules to your training programs, you might discover you can’t find the right file or module because it’s been misplaced somewhere in the organizational structure.
Plus, when updating your content is cumbersome, you’re less likely to do it. You may miss a piece of content that should have been updated or edit content that should have been left as-is.
If updating and organizing your learning content is difficult or overwhelming, and your LMS doesn’t offer support for content management, you probably have a subpar learning management system.
9. High total cost of ownership
Hidden costs are always an unwelcome surprise. If you’ve been hit by a series of hidden costs in your choice of learning management system, you should shop for an alternative with transparent pricing structures and honest contract terms.
Some LMS providers hide the true cost of their software in excessive licensing fees or charges for maintenance and upgrades. It’s often the cheapest learning management systems that are notorious for hiding costs or raising rates after an introductory period.
Clear, all-inclusive pricing, whether a one-time charge or a recurring fee, helps you understand exactly which features and functionality to expect from your LMS. That way, you can budget and manage stakeholder expectations accurately. And you’ll know whether your LMS is providing a positive ROI and supporting your company’s professional development without straining your resources.
10. Negative user feedback
If your business users constantly complain about your LMS software, you should listen to them. Frequent complaints about usability and functionality will manifest in low adoption rates and poor learner engagement. Eventually, no one will use the learning management system you’ve purchased.
Your LMS provider should also listen to customer complaints. A good LMS partner will take customer suggestions on board and respond to them quickly. If they ignore your feedback, they don’t value your business. It’s time to find an LMS that prioritizes your issues and complaints.
Bonus tip! 11. Lack of AI integration
An AI-integrated interface can help you create courses faster, tweak and edit them to make them more engaging, and organize them into learning paths more effectively. You can also automate administrative tasks and use AI to enhance your metrics analysis and reporting.
Older learning management systems won’t offer AI integration, so you’ll need to look for a newer, more innovative company that understands the power of artificial intelligence in online learning in a corporate setting.
Just watch out for suspicious Terms & Conditions that overstep AI boundaries for surveillance and reporting (as Adobe Learning Manager has discovered, companies and their employees don’t appreciate T&C wording that sounds like spyware).
The all-in-one LMS solution – LearnRight!
It’s famously hard to find “the one”, but when you know, you know! 😍
LearnRight is the incredible LMS platform that addresses each pain point we listed above with skillful software development, unwavering customer support, and a dedicated onboarding specialist to help make your corporate training programs successful.
Choosing an LMS doesn’t have to be so daunting. Book a demo of LearnRight to see this adaptive, powerful LMS in action.
