Welcome back to the second half of our detailed two-part article on how to increase opportunities, engagement, and the success of your in-line professional development with Learning Management Software (LMS). If you missed part one, click here. Professional development is something that many employers work hard to provide in order to keep their best talent interested, challenged, and constantly gaining skills they can apply to valuable company tasks. Providing all the classes and coursework necessary to create a comprehensive professional development program can be exhausting. Fortunately, with the help of an LMS, you can get you can provide easy self-directed and well-supported solutions to professional development, saving yourself and future trainees more than a few headaches. In part one, we talked about building a learner’s profile, using lessons to strengthen employee weaknesses, refreshing the teams each week with useful industry material, and keeping all of your professionals up to date on the latest practices and regulations.

Let’s continue with the last five ways to enhance professional development with an LMS.

1. Personal Coursework Recommendations

Many professionals want to pursue career advancement learning but just can’t find the time or the right courses for their needs. They mean to look into new professional courses but between work, commute, and family time at home, it just never happens. Or they mean to find the right courses but after skimming lesson names for five minutes, it all turns into a useless blur. An LMS can solve this by taking all the seeking and guess-work out of the equation. Because an LMS is backed with all the latest personalization and content-serving technology, it can assess the career path and personal learning preferences of each professional and suggest the courses that would be the easiest to pursue and the most beneficial for every one of your employees.

2. Custom Coursework for Internal Positions

Another thing LMSs can manage for you is training for both internal and external hires. With the ability to build your own coursework and serve it in multiple dynamic ways to employees, you can create custom lessons for each internal position that needs to be filled. For new hires, this personalized the onboarding process in a way that a classroom with hand-outs never could. They can go through training that prepares them not just to be a company employee, but to fill the specific role they have been hired for. And with an LMS, new hires will be constantly connected to supporting HR staff who can answer questions and provide guidance at any time. Of course, this is equally if not more useful for current employees who want a new internal position. Through the LMS, they can put themselves through position training courses on their own time, a dedication both their managers and HR will be able to see and encourage through the LMS.

3. Building Teams for Future Projects

LMSs can also be communication platforms that promote collaboration between teams and communication with HR instructors. This can serve a number of purposes, one of which is preparing and building teams for a project that has not yet begun. Through an LMS, the future members of a team can practice working together and collaborating with similar tasks and build their team dynamic before any budget or effort is put into the project they will eventually be working on. By the time the project is ready to begin, the team will already work like a well-oiled machine because they’ve been doing practice runs for a month or more beforehand.

4. Group Studies on Industry Issues

In some cases, professional development may not require any new information at all, simply the opportunity to discuss current industry issues with other professionals in order to develop ideas, in-depth understanding, and possible new solutions. Group discussions, round-tables, and shared studies are an integral part of both school-age and professional learning. With an LMS, your professionals will be able to come together and essentially create their own coursework by challenging each other and the LMS can keep track of who shows leadership skills, has the best ideas, or even who is best at implementing the ideas created by others. This is a form of professional development that, if provided, would put you in a rare category of excellent employer. One thing that professional development almost never includes is the idea that the learners have something to each other and that those lessons can be as or more powerful than pre-made coursework.

5. Personal Assistance for Challenged Learners

Of course, not all professionals are self-starters or high-flyers. Sometimes, you may note that an employee is struggling to succeed at lessons or advance even when they are provided with material that is designed to help. While this is a problem for any manager who is concerned about their employees, an LMS provides a real solution to professionals who are challenged by their professional development journey. The LMS not only tracks personal achievements, it can also help to identify where the problem is and connect struggling employees to the HR staff or others who can provide personal help where automated lessons weren’t doing the trick. With connection and guidance, you may see new and unexpected advancement from professionals who seemed to previously be stuck in a rut.

Providing the Personal Touch

Finally, the most notable benefit of a full-featured LMS is the personal touch. Instead of simply serving lessons and talking at your employees, an LMS encourages a culture of learning inside your business. The tool helps your organization create a knowledgeable, challenged workforce, allowing the leaders to emerge and your organization to flourish. Knowledge Anywhere specializes in providing organizations with a variety of elearning solutions, such as their Learning Management System, Virtual Reality Training solutions, course creation offerings. They have also created elearning tools such as QuickQuiz, an elearning Slack App, and SCORMify, an app that turns videos and documents into SCORM compliant courses.

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