Cutting costs, improving efficiency, and increasing revenues are three of a company’s highest priorities. This is true for businesses of all sizes, including small businesses. One of the best ways to ensure that your company is doing all it can toward achieving these three goals is in effective and ongoing employee training.
In years past, the only real option a company had for conducting employee training was through classroom-based sessions. More recently, however, as web-based technologies have continued to evolve and improve, online learning (also known as “eLearning”) has emerged as the preferred training approach. And the core technology that supports all types of eLearning programs, including employee training and development is known as a Learning Management System (LMS).
The Benefits of a SaaS LMS
An LMS is the software application that enables the building, delivery, and tracking of online courses and eLearning programs. An LMS typically includes the ability for an administrator to oversee the workings of the system and invite instructor and student participation. It also allows instructors to build online courses to meet any specific learning objective. And, finally, it offers a front-end for students to login and conduct their online learning activities.
While a company can choose to host its own LMS, the organizations that choose to do this are typically very large and have the in-house resources to deploy and manage the system. For medium and small businesses, working with a SaaS-based LMS offered by a third party vendor is often a better choice.
Some of the benefits of a SaaS LMS include:
Minimal Up-Front Investment
A SaaS-based LMS eliminates the need to make large, up-front investments in software, hardware, and other supporting infrastructure as all of this is provided by the SaaS LMS vendor.
Minimal Operating Expenses
A SaaS LMS also minimizes the time and resources required to manage and maintain the system as these ongoing services are handled by the vendor, as well.
Meet Current Requirements
One of the challenges of deploying your own hosted LMS is in planning for future capacity needs building that excess capacity into your initial deployment. This causes your company to launch and pay for capacity that you do not currently (and may never) need. A SaaS LMS eliminates this concern by allowing you to choose a plan that meets your specific feature and capacity needs at any given time.
Easy Scaling
With a SaaS LMS, there is no need to acquire and deploy additional hardware and software as your eLearning needs grow. You simply add capacity (often in minutes) that the LMS vendor makes available to all of its clients.
Convenience and Accessibility
With a SaaS LMS, your users can access the training system at any time and place that is convenient for them. All that is required is Internet access. This allows for contextual learning and ensures that critical training information is available to your employees whenever and wherever it is needed.
Use Cases for a SaaS LMS for Small Business
While an LMS can impact numerous areas of a business in support of its training needs, some of the most common uses cases include:
Employee orientation and onboarding
Skills development and enhancement
Compliance awareness
Workplace culture and diversity
LMS Portals: A SaaS LMS for Small Business
LMS Portals offers a SaaS-based, multi-tenant LMS that our small business clients can use to launch and manage multiple, private eLearning environments (portals) on-demand. Using LMS Portals, system administrators can dynamically launch new learning portals to support the training needs of employees, partners, and customers. And each portal you launch has its own branding, user onboarding system, messaging, analytics, and more.
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