As businesses grow, many companies understand that new employees need to be trained to better follow the company’s business environment and processes, and existing employees need to be trained and assessed to continue their career path. “Ok, we need a learning system” might say a manager of a newly created Training Department. But the reality is not so simple. There are hundreds of learning system providers and none of them can fully meet your requirements. So what can you do?

First of all, you must be familiar with the existing terminology in the learning market. What you are looking for is probably called a Learning Management System or LMS. This can confuse many learning systems testers and buyers because of the wide variety of solutions offered as LMS. What is generally called an LMS includes classroom and e-learning management, content creation and publishing, communication and collaboration, assessment and evaluation, competition and performance management, reporting, analysis and integration with HRIS/financial systems. While the basic set of LMS functions are: administration, learning management, reporting and measurement, security, HR related functions, content management, content integration, and e-commerce. Analytics is an advanced feature and not all providers include it in a basic LMS package. The analysis includes: measures of effectiveness, efficiency and compliance. As well as performance management which is a new trend in the LMS market.

Second, LMS providers identify three types of market: midsize, which is defined as companies with between 1,000 and 10,000 students, which can be small and medium-sized companies, companies with more than 10,000 students, and global companies. with a global office location So identify your niche and narrow down the vendor list.

Third, there is one important criteria to think about: your company should have an HR system already in place and in place that keeps records of all employees at your company’s head office and branches in one place. LMS is just an extension to such systems and feeds into HRIS (and sometimes financial systems). Data comes and goes, but it must be kept in one place for consistency.

However, a typical LMS product does not address the critical need to create, manage, and maintain learning system content. If the answer to your question about importing your existing courses from different media is “You can’t unless they’re SCORM compliant!”, and you have no idea what that means, then you probably have to create all your courses from scratch. . Packages like MS PowerPoint and MS Word, ie all those that training departments often use to create learning materials, do not support any existing learning standards. So you need a course creation tool. This new class of learning products is called a Learning Content Management System and is purchased together with LMS. LMS and LCMS are not the same. Let me explain. Students enter a web portal, for example. That portal links the learner to LMS-generated pages where learners can select a course. That course is created by LCMS but delivered by LMS. So if you don’t have LCMS, you have to buy courses from vendors or… or you don’t have courses. This is why you need to make sure that LCMS is actually a part of your shopping LMS and not a separate product. The content management that was mentioned as part of the basic LMS is not the same as LCMS because the latter is concerned with creating, storing and delivering personalized learning content. Content management, by contrast, deals with storing and indexing content for search.

As a conclusion, the evaluator is advised to maintain an understanding of the LMS/LCMS products.