Shortlist Vendors for your LMS Comparison

Now it’s time to start your LMS comparison by identifying the qualified learning solutions that meet your requirements. With so many learning system vendors in the market, it’s important not to start screening them until you know exactly what you need and want. Who wants to compare that many vendors? But, with your requirements finished you are ready for action!

So Many Vendors, So Little Time

There are so many learning technology vendors and so much information, it can be challenging and overwhelming to research them. Websites can look similar even though solutions are not. There’s often no reliable correlation between a website and an LMS vendor’s true capability. Even so, you need a way to decide which vendors to include in your LMS comparison.

While it’s best to start talking with vendors about their LMS platform after the requirements have been defined, there are many questions that will arise now about how to approach an LMS comparison:

• Which vendors should we research and contact? How many should we contact?
• Where do we start? When do we stop?
• How do we know we’re talking to LMS vendors who have the right solutions for our needs and requirements?
• What if the right LMS or learning platform is the next one we would have contacted, but didn’t?

Attempting to individually qualify each vendor and their solution will take too much time and increase the likelihood that you’ll make a poor decision. You may also default to buying a popular LMS cloud software or platform and paying way too much, when what you need is a more specialized, cost-efficient solution that tightly supports your use case and requirements.

Choosing the wrong LMS can have long-term negative consequences for both your organization – overpaying, using only a small portion of a large learning technology system – and for you – facing possible criticism and finger-pointing, and harming your reputation in the organization.

Better LMS Comparison Through Shortlisting

The trick to finding the right LMS is to spend your time closely evaluating qualified vendors – not qualifying each vendor. You can’t do it by yourself; you have to use the resources of the industry.

The resources that can help you shortlist vendors for your LMS comparison include customer review sites, professional groups, industry experts, award lists, your LinkedIn network and, of course, the fiercely-independent resources in the Talented Learning Center!

A targeted, yet comprehensive approach to creating a vendor shortlist will help you avoid common pitfalls. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort developing the business case and defining requirements. Put that information to work now to narrow down the field of competitors.