How to Choose the Best Corporate LMS for your Company.

Selecting a training platform for employee development can be exciting as good corporate LMS allows you to onboard employees, train them, and also improve their capabilities. It can also get daunting and frustrating, with thousands of LMS to choose from. How can you avoid wasting time looking at software that won’t work for you?

There are many different ways to get the best LMS for your company. Either by building your own LMS from scratch, buying an off-the-shelf solution, or opting for an open-sourced LMS. The first two methods have their advantages and disadvantages. For instance, the manpower and technical know-how to build your own LMS from scratch might be unavailable, and hiring experts will cost you a fortune. If you choose to buy an off-the-shelf solution, you may have limited options and not be able to customize it to your taste. There is however a third option that provides the best of both worlds: a managed, open-source learning management system.

Open-source LMS is one where authorized personnel can view or change its source code. That means you can take a well-known LMS, like Klasconnect, and customize it to look and work in a way that suits the exact needs of your company. A managed, open-source LMS gives you the best of both worlds: the flexibility of a customizable system and the stability of a trusted partner to help you manage your new software, and all for less money than any other option.

It’s not enough to determine the type of LMS your company needs, you also need to have well-defined search criteria. It’s crucial to know exactly what you need from an LMS and how it can help you achieve your business goals. This guide will help you through that.

1. Set your company’s aims and objectives: Establish the business objectives you hope to accomplish with e-learning. Is it employee training or client onboarding? To determine the primary goal, you must ask audience-specific questions. From the answer, you should be able to draw out clearly defined goals that will inform your decisions.
2. Know your audience: If you seek to train your employees, you have to understand them and their demographics. If your learners are young, they will enjoy sharing their lectures online and having group discussions so you’ll be better off choosing an LMS with social learning features. How tech-savvy is your staff? If only a few of your employees are tech-savvy, prioritize an LMS that is very simplified and user-friendly. Otherwise, your learners would have to spend valuable time learning how to use the platform instead of growing. If your employees prefer learning on their mobile phones to their laptops, you may need to choose a mobile-friendly LMS. It’s crucial that the LMS you choose match the needs of your learners so they can have an optimized experience.
3. Define your LMS requirements: You have defined your goals and you have studied your audience, it’s time to decide what your requirements are. You can categorize them into negotiables and non-negotiables. This makes your decisions firm and helps you to pick the high-priority requirements over the low-reward ones.
4. Explore the market: You can begin to ask your friends, business partners, or friends which LMS they’d recommend. This cuts your search time in half because you no longer have to go through the process of trial and error. It may seem unimportant, but you must also read and consider user ratings.
5. Evaluate Vendors: Look through different vendors and make sure that their system has the necessary features. At this stage, features are the most important selection criterion. If the platforms don’t meet your requirements, don’t compromise. Check their website to see whether they have any training resources, product manuals, video tutorials, or how-to articles. Another important factor to verify is their tech support, you want to make sure they have a robust customer support team. This implies fast feedback and effective problem-solving. Also, find out how often they handle updates and if that requires extra cost.
6. Test the LMS: Going through the first 5 steps should have narrowed down your LMS search to about 2–3 vendors that meet your requirements. It’s now time to test the platforms. Most LMS offer paid demos (a little fraction of the cost) but some LMS like Klasconnect provide free Demos to clients for a feel of the platform and see if it matches their needs. Don’t settle for browsing through features; try outlining a few scenarios that you and your users would most likely experience to see how the system works. Pay attention to the user interface. If it’s difficult to understand, you will have to spend a lot of time mastering the system.
7. Choose an LMS: It sometimes happens that you can’t make a choice between multiple finalist systems. If they’re genuinely equal in capability, it’s okay to decide based on the cost. Who doesn’t want to save some extra money?

Choosing an LMS can seem quite daunting but following this guide will definitely facilitate the task. Keeping these helpful tips in mind will allow you to avoid a costly trial-and-error process. If you’re looking for a platform that’s very powerful but easy to use, try Klasconnect now! You get a free Demo to try out all the features on the platform without spending a dime! Our support team will be there with you every step of the way.