7 Essential Features a Startup Should Look for in an LMS

If you’re running a startup, you already know that stats aren’t working in your favor.

Be that a proverbial 80% or a closer-to-reality 50%, the number of new business ventures that fail within the first five years is still enormous.

And according to a study by CB Insights, the lack of experience, passion, and problem-solving skills in employees is among the top 20 factors behind startup failure.

A great LMS solution can help recover this shortage.

Here’s what to look for in a startup-friendly learning management system.

Frictionless UX

Don’t overlook this crucial feature only because you believe it should be a given.

User experience is the number one aspect of LMS design and it must be frictionless in order to serve the purpose of eLearning. And we’ll tell you why.

Things like clunky navigation and complicated tools create technical obstacles in a system that should challenge corporate learners with intellectual ones, but not only that.

Being adults with busy schedules, corporate trainees have less time, energy, and patience for continual learning. Add a technical obstacle, and you’ve lost their attention.

The point is, your online trainees should be able to use the system with utmost ease.

Scalability

Judging by the tech they use, it’s clear that most startups doubt they’ll ever succeed.

Rather than planning for the long term and investing in the future, they opt for the cheapest business tools. It’s exactly this kind of mindset that seals their fate.

Instead of repeating their mistakes, choose a solution with a potential for growth.

Have some faith in what you’re capable of and assume that your onboarding needs will start evolving very fast. Perhaps you’ll start training new employees as soon as next year.

When that happens, you’ll need an LMS that will be able to scale with your growing business, to cater to a greater number of users, and to help you boost engagement in the long run.

Easy Access

But in order to grow, you must learn to be efficient.

The secret to startup success is to work smarter, not necessarily harder, which implies clever approaches to everyday operations, including online training.

Consider 24/7 accessibility and mobile responsiveness.

A 2016 study by Towards Maturity has revealed that 57% of employees prefer accessing learning modules on the go, while only 18% are still learning at their work desks!

So make your LMS not only cloud-based and mobile-responsive, but also multiplatform-friendly.

That way, your trainees will be able to learn anytime, anywhere, and from any device.

Authoring Tools

77% of L&D professionals think personalized learning is vital to employee engagement.

Aspiring startups should listen to this sound advice, advocated not only by corporate learning and development experts but also by educators across the board.

In order to personalize your courses, you need online training software with great authoring tools and customization capabilities.

But having built-in authoring tools is important for one other reason — it allows you to create and administer courses from a single, centralized, all-in-one solution.

Such LMS software solution would necessarily include a quiz maker too, as well as a library of templates and training courses that you can customize at your will.

Collaborative Tools

Let’s not forget that learning is a mutual exchange of knowledge and ideas.

It’s in the nature of eLearning technology to reinforce this exchange, yet not all LMS solutions pack a sufficient deal of collaborative tools. Make sure you pick the one that does.

From community calendars to video conferencing, these features should allow both instructors and trainees to share documents and communicate in real time.

A collaborative LMS should also include discussion forums.

That way, every business obstacle that your startup stumbles upon can be a puzzle for an entire team to work on, thus honing their problem-solving skills and overcoming difficulties at the same time.

Robust Analytics

Another common factor behind startup failure is the loss of focus.

Not only is success sustainable only when everyone within a team is focused on a mutual goal, but these goals must also be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

The keyword here is measurable.

If the goal of your online training is to nurture better employees, that that goal must be measurable too. So, another feature to look for in your LMS is analytics.

With robust analytics and visual reporting, you’ll be able to see how your trainees perform with a single glance. Monitoring then gives you insight into knowledge gaps and course quality.

Quizzes and surveys are helpful in this context too, whether as tools for assessing knowledge retention or as tools for collecting trainee feedback.

Using that insight, you can pinpoint trouble areas, identify top talent, and improve your online training, thus setting your startup on a right course for achieving its goals.

Multilingual Support

Here’s a plausible scenario — one goal at the time, your startup will eventually expand enough to start penetrating international markets.

Even if this doesn’t happen, you’ll surely consider hiring remote teams at one point or another. They must be able to access your online training tools as well, and in their native language.

Because of this, your LMS software should be both scalable and multilingual.

Conclusion

Business growth depends on learning and development, so don’t settle for the cheapest LMS you can find. If it doesn’t check all of these seven boxes, better save the money for something else:

1. Frictionless UX
2. Scalability
3. Easy Access
4. Authoring Tools
5. Collaborative Tools
6. Robust Analytics
7. Multilingual Support

These LMS features are essential for startup online training because they drive the aspiring businesses forward by helping them learn, exchange knowledge, and hone their skills.