Making the Switch: What to Look for in an LMS that Empowers Learning

The importance of learning and development (L&D) cannot be overstated. L&D is crucial for keeping employees engaged and helping team members develop the skills they need to excel in their roles. 

But even if you have the best training content, you need the right platform to create, organize, and deliver learning programs that benefit your employees. 

A robust Learning Management System (LMS) isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s an absolute game-changer for your organization to develop a competitive edge. 

You probably already have an LMS for your training needs, but there may come a time when your current LMS no longer serves your needs efficiently.  

The team at Nasuni, the leading hybrid cloud storage solution, switched from its old learning platform to WorkRamp’s All-in-One LMS. As Nasuni’s lead for this initiative, Jaimie McDowell, Sr. IT Change Manager, shares some learnings on what to look for in an effective solution and the benefits you can experience from making the right selection. 

Seamless admin and content creation experience

With so many stakeholders involved in managing and executing a successful learning program, it’s pivotal for an LMS to be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible for administrators and content creators. 

With Nasuni’s old LMS, basic functionalities like admin settings and automations were either difficult to navigate to or nonexistent, and the content creation experience was clunky. For the go-to-market enablement team, building engaging weekly quizzes for their program was a headache without simple drag-and-drop functionality or interactivity. On the onboarding and compliance side, assigning new hire onboarding and regular compliance training to over 500 employees was a manual and tedious process. 

From Jaimie’s experience, here’s what an LMS should provide:  

Intuitive interface

 Your LMS should be straightforward and easy to navigate. Admins, managers, and content creators should feel fairly comfortable diving in from day one. 

Interactive and collaborative content features

Look for a solution like WorkRamp that not only has drag-and-drop functionality, which makes building training a breeze, but also supports various content formats and interactive elements. It should provide collaborative capabilities for teams to work on content together.

“Building quizzes in WorkRamp is just amazing,” Jaimie says. “It’s so much more intuitive and interactive. Dragging and dropping new questions and working on the same screen for the entire quiz is much more efficient than what we previously had.”

Automations

 Your LMS should enhance learning program delivery, not hinder it. Seek out a solution that has automations so you can lessen the administrative burden and focus on high-impact work like content development and program engagement.

For Jaimie, switching to WorkRamp helped her automate monthly security awareness videos, onboarding processes, and employee policy acknowledgments, making compliance management much easier.

“We didn’t have automated reminders that went out to employees or managers previously, so follow-up was a very manual and time-consuming process,” she says. “Now that we do, it helps us to not only save time, but it dramatically supports our efforts to ensure all employees stay in compliance and quickly share evidence to our auditors where needed.” 

Customizable learning experiences 

A critical aspect of any successful LMS is the learner experience. Nasuni discovered that their previous LMS could not customize learning for internal and external learners. 

Internally, learner homepages were generic and displayed all available content. Search functionality was also poor and made it difficult for learners to find courses they wanted or needed. This meant that learners were presented with content that wasn’t necessarily relevant to them. 

On the external customer and partner education side, with alliance partners like Microsoft Azure, Google, and Amazon, Nasuni needed the ability to customize their partner training sites. However, their previous LMS made this difficult.

The registration process was cumbersome and often required the team to manually register partners. The division of partner sites was not intuitive and lacked many controls to ensure the appropriate content was presented to the correct audience. 

Switching to WorkRamp enabled the Nasuni team to deliver more personalized experiences for all internal and external learners. Learner homepages now prioritize showing each employee content that has been assigned to them. Customer and partner training sites are built out with customized, relevant content, and they can leverage WorkRamp’s email templates to send properly branded communications around registration and assignment reminders. 

Across the board, the experience of learning at Nasuni looks consistent while delivering relevant and tailored content to each person.  

Strong data visibility

Lack of data visibility can hinder an organization’s ability to track progress and make informed decisions. How can you make the case for more L&D budget if you can’t drive results and show them to stakeholders? 

This was the exact challenge Jaimie and her team experienced with their previous LMS, but with WorkRamp, the centralized data has made all the difference. With WorkRamp’s ‘My Team’ manager dashboard, all Nasuni’s program metrics are displayed in one place. 

“The metrics are much better,” Jaimie says. “We never had that before where we could just log in and see what’s going on.”

This easy-to-access dashboard allows Nasuni’s team to view all content types in a single place, quickly assess learner performance, manage assignment reminders to drive completions, and handle grading. 

If your LMS isn’t giving you the analytics you need to understand what’s working with your programs and what needs improvement, find a solution with better reporting and data visibility.  

Embracing the benefits of change

Switching to a new platform can be a daunting task. Still, by focusing on a seamless admin and content creation experience, customization, and data visibility like Nasuni did, you can find an LMS that empowers your learners and supports your organization in achieving its goals. 

“Switching to a new LMS has been a game-changer for us,” Jaimie says. “It’s not just about the technology; it’s about empowering our teams and partners, making learning more accessible and efficient, and ultimately, helping us become a more mature and competitive company in today’s dynamic business landscape.”

If your LMS is falling short for your organization, maybe it’s time to consider making the switch. Embrace the change and watch your employees and organization excel with a more agile and effective LMS.

Make your L&D program more effective and efficient with the Learning Cloud. Contact us to schedule a free demo.