Upskilling within an organization is not one of the best ways to ensure that your employees are knowledgeable and sufficiently trained to excel within their positions – it also creates massive opportunities for growth and a much higher chance of success going forward. Additionally, upskilling is also a great way to entice employees to stay happy and loyal, as you are showing them that you are willing to invest in their future.

The challenge, however, is ensuring that you choose to upskill your employees is the most efficient, effective, and manageable option. There are several factors to consider, such as content difficulty, skill gaps, time availability, available budget, ineffective systems, relevant learning material and much more. Unfortunately, paying less attention to any of these challenges above may be the very reason why your upskilling lacks efficacy.

More often than not, we need a little help in order to ensure that our upskilling efforts are actually making a difference. The help? An LMS. An LMS is “A learning management system is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs”.

An LMS provides structure and helps you keep all relevant tasks organized. It helps you keep track of and manage your courses more efficiently, monitor employee progress and challenges, automates reporting processes and more. Ultimately it helps you to effectively train your employees without wasting resources and ensuring that all employees reach their clearly defined goals and outcomes.

You may ask yourself, why would I need an LMS? Below, we discuss a few signs that may indicate that an LMS might be a very big necessity for your organization:

Costs are through the roof

By making use of traditional training methods, it can become quite costly, very quickly – hiring individuals for training, booking venues, travelling expenses, printed resources, arranging sound, refreshments, food, accommodation – the list goes on. By making use of an LMS, you basically eliminate most of the abovementioned costs. Employees will be able to receive training at any location, at whichever time is convenient for them, without all the usual hassles and exorbitant costs of traditional training.

Your employees are mobile, remote, spread far apart

You may experience severe difficulties in trying to arrange training sessions with a group of people that simply cannot get together all at once due to circumstances such as being on the road, working remotely or generally just being located too far from one another.  On-site training will be next to impossible to arrange, including being an inconvenience for several employees due to compromising on schedules and locations.

Training needs to be tracked and monitored

How exactly do you track employee progress during upskilling except via the administration of tests or exams? Anyone can pass an exam with enough effort; however, it does not give an accurate, real-time representation of progress and struggles. Without LMS assessment and reporting tools, it becomes very difficult to know which challenges your employees are facing and whether they are actually understanding the work or enjoying the learning content.

Inconsistent and erratic training

Due to all the challenges involved pertaining to upskilling, it might result in erratic and inconsistent training sessions. Upskilling and training employees are continuous processes involving several different courses, learning resources and focus areas. An ad-hoc approach to learning can severely affect the time it takes to upskill employees, employee mentality, proactiveness within the organization and a general lack of overall development.