Make the most of your LMS with these tips.
Implementing a new learning management system (LMS) is a smart strategic move for organizations invested in employee development. Of course, like any significant change at a company, it requires careful planning and consideration.
Whether you’re adopting an LMS for the first time or seeking to upgrade or enhance your current system, avoiding some common learning management system mistakes will help you maximize its impact on training and development.
Here are eight learning management system mistakes organizations often make:
- Failing to accommodate different learning needs
- Not involving all stakeholders across departments
- Trying to teach too much at once
- Not utilizing integrations
- Improper onboarding to the new system
- Not harnessing data effectively
- Assigning unnecessary rework
- Not listening to employee feedback
Let’s dig deeper into these learning management system mistakes, plus tips for avoiding them and using your LMS to its highest potential.
We’ll also share how our industry-leading LMS, Pinnacle Series, can solve these problems for organizations in the architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing industries.
Mistake 1: Failing to accommodate different learning needs
In a diverse workforce, a one-size-fits-all approach to learning is always going to fall short for someone. This mistake often results in disengaged employees and limited skill development overall.
That’s why a good LMS needs to have flexibility built in. Pinnacle Series addresses this challenge by offering a variety of content formats and personalized learning paths. With a mix of videos, written documents, workflow-style cheat sheets, and interactive testing, Pinnacle Series caters to different learning styles, ensuring that employees can engage with the material in a way that suits them best.
Mistake 2: Not involving all stakeholders across departments
The success of an LMS implementation relies on unity and collaboration across various departments. When stakeholders are not involved in decision-making, the chosen system may not align with the organization’s goals.
Pinnacle Series encourages cross-departmental collaboration from day one. Our implementation team will help you figure out who should be involved in the planning and launch process of the new LMS. This may include individuals from human resources, information technology, marketing, project managers, executives, team leaders, etc.
Learn more about the steps in a Pinnacle Series implementation here.
Mistake 3: Trying to teach too much at once
The human brain can only absorb so much information at a time, which is why overwhelming users with an excessive amount of content can actually hinder the learning process. This is also why sending employees to intensive training seminars or planning one-time software onboarding events is less effective for long-term learning retention.
Pinnacle Series is designed for a blended approach that combines long-term training assignments with bite-sized “microlearning” opportunities. If users just need a quick tutorial to teach them a specific task while they’re in the middle of the job, they’ll find that in Pinnacle Series! And if they want to commit to learning brand-new software skills over a period of weeks or months, our in-depth learning paths allow them to progress through training content at whatever pace feels right to them.
Mistake 4: Not utilizing integrations
An LMS is most effective when integrated seamlessly with other organizational systems. Neglecting to utilize integrations may result in inefficiencies and knowledge silos.
Pinnacle Series addresses this in a few different ways. First, we’ve built the solution to fulfill as many different knowledge-related functions as possible. Pinnacle isn’t just a pre-built LMS. It’s a place where you can house your own custom content, onboarding materials, organizational standards, and more. It’s also a place where users can collaborate on projects via Work Groups, and where users can take their own private notes or publicly contribute their knowledge to the internal database. Other features, like live event scheduling and data analysis, are already part of the platform, too.
Secondly, we’ve included a selection of extra integrations to level up Pinnacle Series even more. That includes our built-in assessment integration, KnowledgeSmart, and a related learning plugin to suggest relevant training content as your employees use Autodesk products.
Mistake 5: Improper onboarding to the new system
Effective onboarding is crucial for the successful adoption of an LMS. Without a proper introduction to the new system, users may struggle to navigate it, leading to frustration and reduced engagement.
Pinnacle Series addresses this challenge by providing comprehensive onboarding resources to organizations that are new to the platform. From pre-launch communication plans to ongoing live support, we want to ensure that all users, from administrators to learners, receive the training they need to make a smooth transition into the Pinnacle Series LMS.
Mistake 6: Not harnessing data effectively
Data is a valuable asset for optimizing the effectiveness of an LMS — but neglecting to leverage it deprives organizations of valuable insights. If you aren’t tracking progress and setting benchmarks, how will you know if your program is successful?
Pinnacle Series provides robust data analytics tools that allow organizations to track user engagement, identify popular course content, and measure the ROI of the learning management system. By harnessing this data effectively, organizations can refine their training programs, make informed decisions, and maximize the impact of their LMS on organizational goals.
Mistake 7: Assigning unnecessary rework
When you’re switching to a new LMS or implementing one for the first time, you’re starting with a blank slate. There’s no data about what employees already know or where their skills gaps are. If there aren’t good features to work around this, it can cost a lot of time and effort for managers and employees to identify what they need to learn — or worse, spend valuable training time inefficiently re-learning things they already know.
That’s where Pinnacle Series’ personalized learning features through KnowledgeSmart come in. Each employee can begin their journey by taking comprehensive AEC & M software assessments to set a benchmark for their knowledge. Then, we’ll use their results to generate individual learning paths that skip any content they’ve already mastered.
Mistake 8: Not listening to employee feedback
Employee feedback is a valuable tool for refining and optimizing your training strategy. When administrators fail to establish channels for feedback, it can lead to missed opportunities for improvement.
By actively listening to employee feedback, organizations using Pinnacle Series can continuously enhance the user experience, making the LMS more user-friendly and aligned with employee needs. And we invite you to pass feedback on to us, too, so our development team can keep a finger on the pulse of client organizational needs!
At Eagle Point Software, we know a thing or two about common learning management mistakes because we’ve walked alongside countless companies as they transform their approach to employee learning and development.
If you’re curious about transitioning your organization to the leading LMS in the AEC & M space, contact our team for a demo or free pilot program of Pinnacle Series!
