How to Lower Your Training Costs with an LMS

The Learning Management System (LMS) market has been experiencing significant growth in recent years. Its popularity is derived from a modernized method for organizational training and reporting that utilizes specialized software. By design, an LMS is meant to be versatile, easily adoptable by businesses and organizations that fit into categories of all types and sizes for training and educational initiatives. The great news, especially for those that have historically been hesitant to introduce eLearning into their current corporate training strategy, is that it also makes quite an impact on the company budget.

According to a Markets and Markets study, LMS market size is expected to continue to grow in years to come, as many organizations adopt digital learning. The 2016 study recorded a market size of $5.22 billion with an expected growth rate to reach $15.72 billion by 2021. This statistic alone is awfully convincing commentary about the benefits of widely-used learning management systems. It is reported to be the fastest growing application segment. The study, in a summary of their findings states the following:

With [research] proving that social and group learning is more productive, organizations are focusing on implementing technologies to enable social and collaborative learning[…] The communication and collaboration LMS application help learners to seek expertise, support on-demand learning, and serve as a platform to connect groups using collaboration functionality.

There is no question that employee learning is trending toward the use of an LMS with the impressive benefits cited above.

Overall, most organizations begin to see significant improvements to their bottom line, benefitting from a ROI after integrating an LMS system for employee training initiatives. Even for smaller organizations, after the initial deliberation and selection process—yes, you should expect to make an initial investment for an LMS—it isn’t long before the benefits of updating their training processes begin to show a return. By streamlining and eliminating the time and money spent in traditional training efforts with classroom-based training sessions, it’s just a matter of time before you can begin to measure the savings experienced by switching to an LMS for your training initiatives.

So how can you significantly lower your corporate training costs and get ahead of the training game by employing an LMS this year?

Save Time, Save Money

Implementing an LMS challenges your staff to manage work time more time efficiently. Rather than requiring employees to attend scheduled trainings, eating up valuable work day hours, assigning the same sessions through an LMS platform allows staff to fulfill their training and certifications when it best fits their attention levels and schedules. Often this means that they will be more focused and time efficient as they complete trainings. It also benefits the budget by not requiring teachers or high-level employees to take valuable, and often expensive, time to appear to train a group of individuals. Which really leads us to the next point.

Innovate with Automation

Going along with the “time is money” point, automation through the use of LMS software delivers time back into the hands of employees, high-level executives, and managers who are tasked with managing training initiatives. Whether they are required to administer, prepare, or track necessary trainings among staff, an LMS is becoming an indispensable tool for efficiency and effecting your bottom line.

Serve an endless amount of students and employees with the effort of planning and uploading important content just once. Diminish valuable work-time spent on the preparation and management of training data by distributing standardized content and viewing results by individual or group. Handle the assignment, results, and documentation for learning groups of any size without any additional steps. This is also beneficial any time you need to update the LMS with new trainings or make changes within your organization. Updates can be completed in seconds with the option to send out automatic messages to any employees or learners with the changes that must be applied.

Fire the Trainer

Perhaps the most obvious means of saving some cash on training is to eliminate the trainer completely. Live instruction not only requires spending time and money on the instruction, each and every time it’s given, but it can also create a problem with employees receiving disparate information. It’s unlikely that information will be relayed identically each and every time the training is given, especially if you have more than one person assigned to distribute training. By allowing your LMS to become the facility that delivers required training information, you wipe out the inefficiencies of scheduling professionals to conduct training sessions and seminars to deliver pertinent information. You may have to pay them to create the content, but from there, you can rest easy knowing that information is delivered uniformly as you experience growth or require follow-up training for certifications that need to be repeated on an ongoing basis.