What’s Your LMS Tracking?

The world of learning content expands every month. Our workers are viewing more video, including short YouTube knowledge chunks, and accessing more content using their tablets, smartphones and other second screens. Collaborative content from structured and community-based social connections is also being added to the mix. Performance support/workplace GPS-type technology is supplying “ride along” content to learners at their moments of need or confusion, and a learner will access Google or Bing to get needed content on the external Web.

The good news is that our workers have access to an increasing amount of content, enabling them to get the support they need, but this creates interesting challenges from an administrative point of view. In a nutshell, how much of this content do we track or run through our learning systems?

The challenge is that most organizations are using LMS systems to track and manage their formal learning resources, ranging from structured e-learning modules to face-to-face or webinar-delivered classes. Yet, a large percentage of expanding learning resources are not linked to enterprise learning systems.

Let’s consider a hypothetical employee named Sara, a rising salesperson at a global company. If we look at her file in the LMS, it duly notes that she went through the classroom and new e-learning-based sales training programs to earn her certificates. Plus, she took a wide range of webinar programs during her first two years on the job.

But here are elements that are not tracked in the LMS:

• She participates in SalesGalore, a website for sales folks from hundreds of companies. She has learned a great deal about closing sales, framing offers and building customer connections from reading and communicating on this site.

• Every week, Sara accesses a wide range of social content from colleagues within her organization, including video segments and entries in several intranet-based collaboration locations.

• Sara has joined Toastmasters, a nonprofit organization which develops public speaking and leadership skills through practice and feedback in local clubs, and this is improving her speaking confidence.