LMS: Your Key to Competitive Advantage

Jason Averbook - 1/2/04

Can a call-center attendant, in the critical moment, quickly find the answer a customer requires to remain loyal? Does a company know if its investment in new product sales training actually contributes to increasing revenue? Overflowing and unmanageable,

The competitive organization requires a learning system that drives business performance by integrating learning into business processes for employees, customers, suppliers and partners. Such a system makes learning a strategic, enterprise-wide solution instead of a departmental solution. In this capacity, all information stores and learning tools combine to extend the capabilities of human capital. Deploying learning in alignment with business objectives gives organizations a competitive advantage in today’s knowledge era.

Formal, instructor-led or classroom training represents only one kind of learning. Learning itself encompasses all the diverse, numerous ways people absorb knowledge, including on-the-job experience, seminars, e-learning and so on. Events such as new product launches, sales forecasts, career moves, succession plans, industry trends and customer requests can trigger learning.

Leveraging One of the Last Competitive Differentiators
This is the information age, the knowledge era—employees, managers and executives are inundated with too much information. Competition today has narrowed players down to an increasingly lean, business-savvy group, and one of the last competitive differentiators is the incredible impact of learning on performance.

Efforts to successfully wield knowledge across the enterprise form a significant trend as organizations seek to maximize their investments in the workforce and tighten bonds with customers, suppliers and partners. “Those companies that do the best job of empowering their workers through education and training are most likely to enjoy the highest levels of economic success,” wrote Steve Lynch in the September issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine (“The CLO’s Role: Balancing the Learning Mix in Outsourced Environments”).

Ideally, learning is customized and personalized, combining various activities and methods. Enterprise-wide blended learning based on role and individual needs is another trend today. Blended learning supports e-learning, webinars, books and education, as well as instructor-led, self-paced, ad-hoc and on-the-job training.

Learning Today: Fragmented, Inefficient, Immeasurable
Despite current trends, even some of the most advanced corporations have not successfully organized and strategically leveraged their vast learning potential in all its forms.