The CPD Saviour: Learning Management Systems & Why You Need One
In today’s modern business environment, ensuring that employees complete mandatory Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is now becoming an industry-wide expectation.
Whether responsible for the CPD of five employees or five thousand, the management and delivery of an effective CPD can be a daunting task.
After all, each individual within the organisation differs in learning style, with some theoretical models identifying as many as seven different learning types.
However, the complexity does not stop there: as each department may require different training or courses, and almost certainly, an up-to-date record of the CPD; this shifts the burden on an individual internal or external to the organisation to ensure that CPD fulfils its function effectively.
As a solution to this dilemma, many organisations are increasingly turning to Learning Management Systems (LMS) to assist in how CPD is administrated.
Your Work, Simplified.
So, to what extent can LMS benefit your industry, or more specifically, you in your corporate role?
Firstly, unlike traditional alternatives, an LMS is a cost-effective solution for CPD delivery that uses software and web-based technology; this can plan, deliver and assess a specific learning process or objective for your company with ease.
However, in addition to being effective in both cost and time, one of the hidden benefits of using an LMS is that this brings everything relating to the CPD in your company into one single repository.
On the one hand, while an effective LMS should enable you to set your own defined learning outcomes by facilitating custom training courses through the authoring tool, an effective LMS platform should also enable staff to select courses according to job role and location.
In addition to this benefit, the database offered through an LMS reports on all of the CPD activities for your workplace and is key to tracking compliance of the organisation: this means that, where traditional approaches left some employees behind, training progress for each employee is now not only tracked by the LMS- but also available as statistical reports for the upper manager.
Additionally, another significant benefit of using an LMS is that the platform is location-independent. With the rise of flexible working and virtual collaboration, this approach facilitates the option of completing the training whether physically present at the office or not.
Moreover, this approach to delivering CPD also gives the employee the opportunity to undertake activities related specifically to their area of work, therefore ensuring that the minimum time is spent in either the office or home. (Avery, 2015).
Another dimension to this system is that this automates the professional relationship building process between the organisation and its employees; the pathway of learning offered through LMS not only aids in developing and attracting talent from the outside, but also significantly impacts the ability of an organisation to retain the best of its talent and employees. (Fermi, 2017).
A Tool For All
Just as employees are different in learning styles, so too are the required training elements within an organisation.
This means that, although LMS incorporate the practical benefits and flexibility provided through their elearning components, the most advanced LMS on the market recognise the importance of retaining an emulating the advantage of face-to-face interaction (Avery, 2015).
By using this approach, this enables leading LMS providers to access training specialists whether on or off-site.
Additionally, for employees with a more aural or kinaesthetic learning modality, these practical components mean that even fewer employees within the organisation are left behind.
At Qintil for example, we not only recognise the role of LMS in maximising learning delivery irrespective of the industry and learning styles of its employees, but also recognise that many of these benefits can in-fact be amplified even further in certain industries as witnessed first-hand in the healthcare sector: collaboration and compliance are centric to every modern organisation, but when the consequences of not achieving compliance are raised to a higher level, so too should an organisation’s awareness of the solutions to manage its compliance towards its mandated requirements.
From the ability to access rich data to the practical benefits of ensuring employee compliance regardless of learning style or stage, the benefits of LMS not only represent a smart investment into a platform for leveraging the relationships between existing employees, but also a strategy for ensuring that the best talent is attracted to an organisation by placing the development of its employees centre stage.
References
Avery, R. (2015) WED: Blended Learning for CPD: A case study on the development & implementation of a blended learning model to enhance study day learning opportunities. Available at: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/8881.
Fermi, M. (2017) Considering an LMS: 7 Questions to help build a business case. The Business of People. Available at: https://blog.qintil.com/considering-an-lms-7-questions-to-help-build-a-business-case-1450189a91a0.
