Before You Consider Your E-Learning Platform

When it comes to learning management systems it is important to remember that no matter what the sales people tell you, the tool is not the solution. The LMS helps you implement your training strategy, it does not create it. How you use the tools available to you is the key to your success. Before you select an e-learning platform, you need to honestly identify your organization's current state. Otherwise you run the risk of buying a system that doesn't meet your organizations current and future needs. The current state consists of your company's goals, the employee's knowledge and skill gaps, the existing programs used to address those gaps, and what stands in the way of fulfilling your company's training needs. Once you identify your current state, you can start to think strategically about how training supports the organization's goals, how you measure training success, and where your training organization needs to focus. Clarifying what success looks like and where training's energy should be focused sets the table for marketing your organization, something training organizations are notoriously bad at doing. Marketing is not about exaggerating the value of what training does, it is a strategic approach to showing your true value to the organization. To successfully market your training organization, you need to think in terms of brand. Branding is more than just a logo and a consistent look and feel to all materials training produces. It is about letting your organization know what to expect when you provide them with assistance. When people hear about your training department, what do you want them to visualize? What sort of personality do you want to convey? Creating a consistency about the image you want people to have sets the tone for the way you communicate with your organization. Branding and marketing requires you to differentiate yourself from internal and external competition. You should be able to explain why the e-learning that took 6 weeks to create is better training than the webinar that featured a power point presentation that was slapped together in a half hour. Business majors have been taught that whatever doesn't bring in income is overhead and in order to make a profit, overhead must be trimmed. While that is a useful model, it ignores certain realities. Because organizations are siloed and departments are highly specialized, getting your organization to stop thinking of you as a cost center is a difficult mind switch. Companies that don't think of the organization as a complex system of interacting departments and individuals and instead look only at the bottom line lose sight of the value both tangible and intangible of so called overhead. Return on investment analysis is an important tool to use in helping your organization make the mind switch.