Why Your Organization Needs a Learning Management Platform

When it comes to ensuring your organization provides better care to persons served, there are few options better than creating a culture of learning. To truly embrace this cultural shift, your organization needs to provide staff with the tools necessary to learn and embrace their curiosity. This is where a learning management platform comes in.

A learning management platform makes it more convenient for your staff to learn, while streamlining reporting, course enrollment, and other administration duties. To truly understand why your human services organization needs a learning management platform, let’s explore some of the features included in these platforms and how they can help you and your staff.

Nurture a Culture of Learning With a Learning Management Platform

First and foremost, platforms that contain high quality content can lead to better training results. While content needs will vary from organization to organization, look for courses that have the following qualifications:

• Created by experts in their field, with the industry accreditations to prove it
• Scenario-based modules that create learning environments based on real-world situations
• Training content for both clinical and paraprofessional staff

Additionally, you’ll want to make sure the learning management platform you choose comes with training content that can cover the breadth of the roles in your organization.

To make sure your staff is getting the most out of this content, look for learning management platforms that implement learning methods specific to adults. These methods take on a variety of forms — and that’s a good thing! By implementing a variety of adult learning methods your organization can meet the diverse needs of adult learners and ensure a high quality of training for your staff.

While there are a variety of learning methods used by learning platforms, the following are the most important to consider:

• Blended learning: Training that incorporates the benefits of both in-person and online learning
• Microlearning: Training that breaks up learning material into small chunks, often between five and 30 minutes
• Spaced repetition: A training technique that has proven to increase the rate of memorization in which learners are periodically quizzed over a set time frame

The above points can help you create a culture of learning at your organization by engaging your staff in interesting training specific to their needs.

A learning management system can also help nurture and grow this culture. Using competency management and tracking features, you can gain insight into your staff’s abilities. This will allow you to develop personalized learning plans for staff to help address knowledge gaps with targeted training.

Improve Your Administrative Abilities Using a Learning Management Platform

Making sure that staff members maintain their compliance training is crucial for every organization. An organization can face serious consequences if compliance training is mismanaged, such as incurring costly fines or placing clients at risk. With a learning management platform, administrators can track staff’s progress through onboarding and annual recurring compliance training. With this capability, you can gain insight into which staff members are at risk of not completing their training on time and those who are overdue.

When it comes time to report on compliance, learning management platforms contain features that allow you to easily analyze and export your compliance data. With these features you can:

• Report on the compliance rates of individuals, departments, and the organization as a whole
• Track and report on the completion of specific training plans

These capabilities will make the job of finding gaps in your compliance management easier to identify, helping to mitigate risks associated with the reporting process.

While reporting features are crucial, integration abilities are what make a learning management platform truly efficient. Your platform will allow you to cut out manual work, such as creating new learner profiles, giving you the ability to focus on more strategic L&D tasks.

Alongside an effective integration, make sure the learning management platform you are implementing allows for automatic enrollment into courses and training plans. That way, staff members who fall within a particular profession, job role, or department can automatically receive the appropriate courses necessary for their position in your organization.

A Partner in Your Journey

As with any organization-wide initiative, adopting a learning management platform is a journey. From picking the right platform to getting staff into the system, creating training, and troubleshooting issues, it’s a large undertaking. Fortunately, learning management platform providers can act as partners in this endeavor.

As administrators and staff alike begin using the platform, questions will undoubtedly arise. Having the ability to lean on your provider to answer these questions is crucial. Your vendor should be able to:

• Help you demonstrate the ROI of using its platform and work with you to establish useful workflows during implementation
• Help you fully leverage your platform features
• Provide ongoing, high-quality customer support whenever issues or questions arise

Choosing a partner who can help with these tasks and more will not only allow you to get the most out of your learning management platform but grow your organization as well.

As your organization brings on more staff, expands its services, or even opens multiple locations, a learning management platform can scale up to match this growth. This way, rather than having to adopt different learning technologies to accommodate your new requirements, you’ll have one solution that can help guide you and your staff through any growing pains that arise.

Building a Better Organization Through Learning

No matter what stage your organization is at in its learning journey, a learning management platform can help you take the next step.

With courses and learning modules designed to meet the needs of your staff and administrative abilities that remove the manual labor of running a learning and development program, learning management platforms are designed to help you create a sustainable culture of learning.

But why should you create a learning culture? By prioritizing learning in your organization, you can:

• Create a more engaged staff base. Human services providers are naturally curious and intelligent people. By working to create a culture of learning, you can feed this curiosity in a way that makes both your staff and your organization better.
• Increase staff retention rates. Studies have shown that replacing staff costs 50-200% more than retaining them. By providing staff with opportunities to learn and grow their careers, you’re more likely to retain their specialized skills and knowledge.
• Increase the level of care given to persons served. As your staff members enhance their knowledge and skills, they can offer better care to clients.