There’s no other industry where learning is more important than professional services – indeed it’s mandatory for many legal, consulting, engineering and accounting jobs.
Firms need to provide an LMS platform for the continued education of their professionals – ideally tracking CLE, CE and CPD credits as required by industry associations in various jurisdictions.
How do you find the best LMS system for your firm?
Here are some things to ask yourself as you evaluate the options:
Can it handle requirements for different jurisdictions and industries?
Can your LMS serve the entire firm by keeping track of the credits required in different jurisdictions and industries?
Even better if it can tie courses and curriculums to required credits. This could help your professionals get their required credits by taking courses that add real value to their careers.
Can it support all types of learning?
The best LMS systems allow you to present training in several ways, including in-person, e-learning, quick reference guides etc.
Your chosen LMS should integrate with common online conferencing platforms, including GotoMeeting, GotoWebinar or Webex.
Can it make your people more efficient?
When time literally is money, your professionals can’t afford to waste it trying to find the right course.
An LMS with Google-like search functionality will enable your professionals to quickly find relevant courses by title, credits, location and learning type (online vs in-person).
A calendar view will save even more time. Some solutions offer seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook. This should be bi-directional and one-click. For example, if the user clicks on a course, it should be automatically added to their calendar. Likewise, if they delete the event from their Outlook calendar, their registration should be deleted.
Does your LMS alert users to important courses that are coming up? Your homepage should notify users of all mandatory courses, such as harassment prevention.
Can it improve your talent management strategy?
Does your LMS integrate with your other talent management systems? Your LMS should function seamlessly as part of a holistic talent management solution. It should feed into:
- annual personal development plans that include learning
- annual performance reviews that tie competencies to learning objectives
- career development planning where an individual can identify their skills gaps and tie them to on-the-job learning
You can then create tailored learning programs to address skills gaps and benchmark people’s performance improvement over time.
Will it make your talent management initiatives more efficient?
Does your LMS simplify in-person training event management? Some solutions can manage course attendees by meeting room size, automatically creating waiting lists when a particular course is full.
Your LMS should also integrate with online meeting tools like GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and WebEx to save time.
Have you considered empowering people to teach each other? A good LMS will enable your employees to create content that can be uploaded (and approved) and shared with others.
It’s also worth looking for an LMS that enables employees to rate and review the quality of learning content so that you can improve your learning library over time.
vi by Aderant offers all this, and more
Our LMS and Credit Tracking platform meets all the above criteria and more. It’s an intuitive product that easily plugs into your existing talent management solution.
We’d love to tell you more about it and take you through a quick demo.