Providing effective employee training used to be a strategic choice that organizations would make. Today supporting continuous employee development and growth is expected. Making everything from efficient employee onboarding to meeting compliance and regulatory requirements and upskilling and retraining your workforce a crucial necessity.
However, as companies experience the inevitable changes in their needs that arise during expansion, the challenges associated with scaling corporate training, education, and learning programs become increasingly complex.
Some of the key challenges a growing business may face in developing effective corporate learning strategies include:
- Maintaining quality during expansion
- Adapting to subtle shifts in organizational culture
- Aligning training and learning with rapid business growth
- Avoiding overwhelming teams tasked with manual operating the platform administrative tasks
And this is where an Enterprise Learning Management System (LMS) comes in.
In this exploration, we’l will dive into some of the common hurdles organizations face during expansion, and explore how to unlock the transformative power of an Enterprise LMS for your growing business.
The challenges of scaling corporate training in growing companies
As a business grows, the demand for a skilled and adaptable workforce intensifies. In a recent study with the Brandon Hall Group, L&D teams in large businesses employing over 10,000 workers ranked upskilling their staff in order to keep up with shifts in business needs as their top challenge (68 percent). Meanwhile, those in smaller businesses ranked that need in third position (47 percent), coming in just below managing and delivering learning priorities and measuring training effectiveness, with 50 percent of respondents experiencing challenges in both of those areas.
This clearly demonstrates that as a business grows, the challenges around upskilling your workforce grow with it.
However, McKinsey claims that up to 43 percent of executives continue to experience skills gaps in the workforce, with 55 percent stating that they expect the skills gap to persist or worsen over the next ten years.1 So while the demand is there, meeting it remains a challenge for many.
Organizations that experience exponential growth without the support of an Enterprise LMS often run into problems when it comes to dealing with the complexities of scaling their training initiatives.
1. Maintaining quality during expansion
One of the primary challenges encountered by growing companies is the preservation of training program quality. As your workforce expands, the processes, workflows, and training that ensure each employee receives comprehensive and high-quality training become increasingly complex. The surge in demand for training, coupled with an escalating workload, growing user numbers, and the influx of substantial data can lead to sacrifices around performance or user experience. Potentially leading to the effectiveness of employee training initiatives being undermined.
Without the appropriate tools to adeptly handle this increased demand, companies risk compromising the performance and user experience of their training programs. This potential compromise can, in turn, undermine the very essence of employee training initiatives, hindering the development and upskilling of employees essential for sustained organizational success.
2. Adapting to subtle shifts in organizational culture
An expanding workforce can lead to subtle shifts in organizational culture, and the challenges around maintaining and supporting that culture increases as new hires integrate into existing teams. Each addition to the team brings a fresh perspective, contributing to the organic evolution of the company's culture, and maintaining and strengthening that culture as it evolves is vital for both the enhancing the employee experience, and aligning with the core values and mission that define your organization's identity.
This emphasizes the critical need for corporate training programs that not only equip employees with essential skills, but also serve as a method to ensure that everyone remains on the same page. Fostering a sense of belonging and shared commitment are crucial elements in maintaining a positive employee experience, and a positive employee experience brings improved productivity, higher customer satisfaction, reduced turnover, lower safety incidents, and an overall boost to profitability.
3. Aligning training and learning with rapid business growth
Establishing effective corporate learning strategies capable of keeping up with the rapid pace of business growth is a delicate balancing act. It involves anticipating the needs and skill sets required for the future, ensuring that training programs are not just current but forward-looking.
This means looking across your organization to determine if there is an emerging skill that, while currently scarce in the industry, shows future potential. Just as the finance industry struggled to catch up right up through 2020 when blockchain and crypto took off in 2018, the challenge lies in identifying those emerging skills and ensuring that corporate training programs remain agile and responsive enough to keep up. Failure to synchronize training with your organization's growth trajectory may result in a workforce that is inadequately prepared for new challenges and opportunities.
Another prime example is how the impact of AI-powered tools and capabilities has been felt across nearly every industry, and yet an AMD survey shows that nearly 50 percent% of enterprises are at risk of falling behind in AI adoption, a statistic that would probably be a lot lower if training in AI was introduced earlier.
Even outside of industry-wide changes, you need to be able to forecast and adapt to shifts within your own organization. For example, if your company is considering venturing into new markets, additional compliance and regulations training may be required, or new courses for improving language proficiency and cultural awareness might become necessary. An effective training strategy should not only address the current needs of the workforce but also equip employees with the skills required for anticipated challenges and opportunities.
4. Avoiding overwhelming teams with manual platform administrative tasks
The trainers, instructional designers, and administrators tasked with setting up and operating a corporate training program have a lot on their shoulders. Expected to manage everything from handling multiple stakeholders, pivoting with unpredicted market or product changes, updating content, monitoring for gaps in skills or knowledge, and ensuring that learners are prepared to perform effectively and safely. The problem is that workers like those tasked with operating a training program report spending over three hours a day on these manual and repetitive tasks, with 51 percent claiming it gets in the way of doing their main job.2The problem is that performing all of these tasks without the tools and automation provided by an Enterprise LMS.2
For example, administrators must perform meticulous manual data entry for each and every enrollment, instructional designers are forced to sift through each module to identify outdated content and track down new material for each course update, and the progress and performance tracking performed by trainers becomes a time-consuming task that’s prone to oversight. Performing tasks like these manually in this way makes it hard to manage and can lead to mistakes that impact the corporate training program efficiency, cost, and effectiveness. And as more people join the training programs, the lack of automation becomes even more of an issue, putting a significant strain on these professionals, taking away time and energy that could be used to make the training content better.
Why growing businesses turn to an Enterprise LMS for employee training
1. Scalability: Tailoring learning to company size
The key advantage of an Enterprise LMS — especially when it comes to growing companies — is its inherent strength in scaling corporate training. Unlike legacy LMS systems, an Enterprise LMS is able to seamlessly grow with your organization, accommodating an expanding user base without compromising performance. This scalability ensures that training programs remain effective and impactful, whether you have a team of 50 or 5,000.
2. Adaptability: Adjusting learning to shifts in your company
The adaptability of an Enterprise LMS allows organizations to tailor their learning experiences to the specific needs and size of their workforce. Whether onboarding new employees or upskilling existing ones, an Enterprise LMS is able to seamlessly adjust to changes in everything from skill requirements and learning styles to organizational culture, ensuring that training remains up to date. This capability allows for finely tuned and consistently relevant training, contributing to employee development and growth that sees workers emerge both well-equipped with skills and attuned to your organization's evolving ethos.
3. Efficiency: Streamlining employee training to maintain impact
Whether you’re a student, a trainer, or the one signing off on expenses, training program efficiency and effectiveness is top priority — and this is one area where an Enterprise LMS shines. Offering targeted employee training with personalized paths based on roles, skills, and preferences, an Enterprise LMS ensures that learners engage with the most pertinent content, minimizing wasted time, resources, and money. Plus, the ability to automate administrative tasks, enrollment, content delivery, and progress tracking ensures that trainers are freed up to focus on improving course content and delivery.
Top 5 LMS scalability features for a growing business
The role of an Enterprise LMS in supporting employee development and growth within an evolving business environment can’t be overstated — but not all solutions are created equal. From modular and flexible course design to robust analytics, seamless integration capabilities, a user-friendly interface, and the transformative power of AI, below we’ve outlined the top five LMS scalability features that not only support but enhance organizational expansion.
1. Modular and flexible course design
Different course types, subjects, learning styles and other factors that need to be taken into consideration when planning employee training courses will all change based on differing needs and requirements. This may seem like an obvious fact, but with over half of enterprise-level organizations stating that they face challenges in providing their learners with personalized content to meet individual needs, it can be difficult to overcome without the right tools.
This means that ensuring that your Enterprise LMS facilitates modular and flexible course design is essential. This modular approach allows organizations to break down complex training content into manageable segments, making it easier to update and adapt as your organization evolves. The agility of such a design ensures that employee training programs can be adjusted swiftly to meet the ever-changing needs of your growing business.
Key fact:
58 percent of workers surveyed in a recent Gallup poll would be more likely to use their company’s online learning tools if the content was broken up into multiple, shorter lessons — something that having an Enterprise LMS with modular and flexible course design makes easy to create.3
2. Analytics and reporting for tracking progress
Whether onboarding new workers, upskilling an existing workforce, or keeping employees up to date on changing regulations, the end goal always boils down to one thing — results.
Understanding the effectiveness of employee training programs is crucial for both ensuring the effectiveness of existing programs and delivering continuous improvement as a business changes. And to demonstrate that a training program is delivering results, you need data. However, around half of all businesses at both the enterprise level (54 percent) and smaller organizations (50 percent) experience difficulties in measuring the effectiveness of their learning programs.
With an Enterprise LMS, an organization is able to benefit from a vast amount of data and analytics on learners and their activities, while also making it easy to create custom reports, visualizations, and more. These metrics empower organizations to simplify the process of measuring training program success, allowing them to turn data into actionable insights and refine their training strategies for optimal results.
Key fact:
82 percent of business leaders say reporting and analytics is a vital Enterprise LMS feature for improving their digital approach to business learning, ranking second only to learner engagement which came in at 90 percent.4
3. Integration capabilities with other tools and systems
An employee training program should not only feel like a part of your company, it should be able to enmesh itself directly within it. This means that an Enterprise LMS should seamlessly integrate with the other tools and systems used within your organization in order to communicate results and increase effectiveness. This integration ensures that training efforts align with broader organizational strategies, promoting consistency and efficiency across all facets of your business. Whether it's integrating with HR systems for streamlined onboarding or connecting with project management tools for skills application, a well-integrated LMS becomes the central hub of your organizational learning ecosystem.
Key fact:
A great employee onboarding program that allows for a smoother process and integrations that allow for direct interactions with HR can improve employee retention by 82 percent and company productivity by 70 percent.5
4. User-friendly interface for both trainers and learners
No matter how good the training materials, analytics, and integrations may be, nobody wants to use an Enterprise LMS that feels clunky or difficult to navigate. A platform featuring a simple, intuitive design that’s easy to navigate benefits everyone using it, helping to foster engagement and ensure a smooth learning journey. And that doesn’t just extend to the learners either, but to everyone from the admins and facilitators to the external instructors and everyone else involved in its operation. This user-centric approach enhances the overall effectiveness of employee training initiatives.
Key fact:
88 percent of online users say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience, while bad mobile optimization annoys 48 percent of users6 — statistics that would almost certainly extend to a poorly designed Enterprise LMS and impact its effectiveness.
5. AI-powered personalization and engagement capabilities
There’s no ignoring the transformative power that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought to many aspects of the way we live and work, and corporate training is no exception. AI-powered capabilities allow your Enterprise LMS to develop personalized learning paths, tailoring courses based on individual completion history and their needs and preferences, all while analyzing learner performance in real-time to deliver adaptive assessments and dynamic feedback for a more tailored learning experience. Other benefits like leveraging natural language processing to automatically transcribe and timestamp video lessons allow users to quickly and easily locate topics or information quickly and easily, while training can be made more interactive and enjoyable by intelligently gamifying the learning experience based on individual preferences and progress.
In short, an Enterprise LMS equipped with AI tools and capabilities takes corporate training to the next level, vastly improving its scalability while providing new methods for enhancing the overall learning experience for everyone involved.
Key Fact:
Factors such as the appeal of intelligent automation, along with the potential for personalized learning and data generation have seen calculations on AI's contribution to the education market set to grow at an astounding compound annual growth rate of 36 percent right through 2030.7
What’s next?
The evolving landscape of business demands an evolving approach to employee development, making effective training a necessity that will only increase in importance as time goes on. So for growing businesses in search of a scalable training solution that can adapt to their evolving needs, an Enterprise LMS can bring success within reach.
If you’re ready to explore how to deliver scalable, efficient, and effective training that will ensure that your workforce is not just keeping up but leading the way — book a demo with Absorb today.
- https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/sustainable-inclusive-growth/chart-of-the-day/mind-the-skills-gap
- https://www.automationanywhere.com/company/press-room/global-research-reveals-worlds-most-hated-office-tasks
- https://www.softwareadvice.com/resources/top-lms-features-employee-engagement/
- https://wpminds.com/what-is-the-learning-management-system/
- https://shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/special-reports-and-expert-views/Documents/Retaining-Talent.pdf
- https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/ux-statistics/
- https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/artificial-intelligence-ai-education-market-report
