In this Learn Amp Review, you'll see how the company is driven by its goal to help make work life better for everyone involved. From the newest person joining the business, to the employee who has been there the longest, they want to improve the work experience with a platform that has many points of impact. It's not just an LMS and not just an LXP, but a way to help businesses develop people. This is purposefully broad, because the platform addresses many different use cases – for employees, customers, partners and others.
One of the ways it does this is by focusing on connection, coming together and building peer communities where people can learn in improved ways. Learn Amp seeks to answer questions like, how can people collaborate around learning, deepen those experiences and increase engagement? And then, how can this be linked back to performance through measurement?
Founded five years ago, Learn Amp is a privately-held, UK based company with 50 employees and over a 100 organizational clients around the world. Most customers are in the mid-market, but Learn Amp also scales to very large enterprises. The company prides itself on its ability to scale and build functionality quickly against an aggressive product roadmap.
Learn Amp Products
In our Learn Amp review, we cover how the company provides a three-pronged product portfolio:
- Learn – this is the learning management system (LMS) and learning experience platform (LXP)
- Connect – provides the environment for social learning and engagement
- Perform – a performance management platform for reviews, surveys and goal setting
The modules do not have to be purchased together, so a customer can start with one and then add others as desired.
The platform is delivered in 14 different languages, with true internationalization and localization built in. It's hosted on Amazon Web Services for intensive workloads, which provides high levels of compute and memory resources.
Target Market
Learn more about Learn Amp in the Talented Learning Center!
Learn Amp is well-suited for employee learning and for extended enterprise, especially for businesses with complex structures. These include matrixed organizations, retail companies, franchises and other businesses that might not have a traditional hierarchy.
The company has customers in industries like financial technology and other information technology businesses, such as software, gaming and cyber security. They also work with more traditional financial services, banking and insurance firms – although they are certainly not limited to these areas.
Learn Amp Product and Technical Strengths
Learn Amp has developed its platform from the perspective that the employee experience has become significantly more personal. Organizations want to know how their employees are feeling, and what they can do to help employees be happier and more engaged at work. From the employees' perspective, they want to see the impact learning and development can have for them and their career paths. So, Learn Amp focuses on providing the digital tools to map and understand the broader employee experience. This is especially important because there is a tangible link between happy and high-performing employees and satisfied customers.
The user interface in the LMS is widgetized, which is becoming more common and provides a high-degree of flexibility to custom-design learning environments for different types of use cases, roles, organizational structures, etc. The goal with the interface is to give both learners and administrators an experience they will enjoy when using it.
The LMS is structured around a content engagement philosophy. This basically means that the organization and users can upload created content, import third-party and web-based content, and build content directly in the application. So, anyone can upload SCORM courses, videos, podcasts, documents and more. For individuals who are not administrators, they first share the content with curators who decide whether it's more broadly applicable to the organization. In this way, individuals can build their own libraries and can also share approved content within an established governance process.
When it comes to web-based content, Learn Amp provides over 6,000 pieces of complimentary web content. It also has a Google Chrome extension that allows users to quickly import an article, YouTube video, podcast, TED Talk or other web content with a single click. The LMS is designed to become a hub for sharing and collaboration for employees, customers or other learning communities.
Learn Amp was also specifically designed so the platform can be administered in a decentralized fashion. This way, the business can be more involved with how it wants to structure and share learning. This delegated administration is particularly useful for matrixed organizations who may want different learning portals according to business units, and also for those organizations offering extended enterprise learning to customers or partners.
Event tool
The event tool enables the management of any face-to-face or virtual events, like webinars and town halls. It contains all the pre-event, enrollment and post-event activities that you might imagine, and is similar to other event management tools that people use to deliver training and educational programs. It allows for videos, downloadable files, recording and sharing. The advantage here is that Learn Amp eliminates the need for a separate event management tool, although it does integrate with Zoom for those who have already chosen that avenue.
Assessments and feedback
Learn Amp supports traditional assessments, such as quizzes, and allows the addition of images and videos to make them more interactive. There are timed assessments and competitions, along with recommendations for additional training based on a learner's score.
Another interesting feature is that learners can ask for feedback from colleagues or peers. For example, a salesperson could record a mock customer conversation, or a manager could role play a difficult discussion with an employee. These recordings can be submitted for feedback and critique.
People can do self-assessments on their learning progress, and trainers can give feedback on students. So there is a full range of mechanisms for tracking learning outcomes – from the employee's perspective and from their managers, peers and instructors.
Learning journeys
Learn Amp allows for the construction of learning journeys, or paths for specific goals or activities. One example is onboarding, where a learning journey can walk a new employee through a fixed sequence of courses. Other journeys can be more flexible in how they're completed. Learning journeys can be composed of in-person courses, digital assets, e-learning, quizzes and any other internal or external content. It also provides for interventions and notifications to managers or trainers.
Reporting and more
No learning platform would be complete without reporting and analytics, and Learn Amp provides both with the added ability to tie learning to performance through its Perform module. The dashboard widgets allow for a range of information to be displayed, such as active sessions over time, leaderboards, most popular content, average session length, etc. Managers can also see role-based org charts that display information about their teams. These org charts enable drill-down reporting and filtering, so managers can get insights and see exceptions, but only at the levels they're permitted to access.
This Learn Amp review has largely focused on the LMS portion of the product. Keep in mind that there are also social engagement and performance management modules that also contribute to reporting insights.
Join the Talented Learning Center as a free Basic Member and access a demonstration and business briefing of the Learn Amp solution presented by Learn Amp Chief Commercial Officer, Joe Hill-Wilson.
Professional Services Offered
Learn Amp provides implementation assistance, professional services and customer success teams. As part of the implementation process, the company focuses on customer readiness, where they are currently and what they're trying to achieve with learning. The goal is always to focus on the business result, so the customer can fully utilize the product and realize value from their learning investment.
Following implementation, Learn Amp emphasizes ongoing communication, such as regular product release webinars, roadmap updates and feature tutorials. A support tool guides customers to relevant content in the knowledge base, chat bots assist with routine questions, or customers can contact the team directly with questions and feature requests.
Opportunities for Improvement
Learn Amp has the foundation functionality to provide an employee-external learner solution, but they don't market it. Most of their website uses the employee use case language. In their shoes, I'd add customer learning, partner training and even association learning as use cases that they should publicly target – with or without the employee component.
My Assessment
Overall, Learn Amp is a thoughtfully-designed solution for both internal and extended enterprise training, especially since so many organizations now are seeing the value of doing both within the same platform. It definitely excels with its ability to delegate administration so that different audiences, departments or business units can have their own independently-managed learning environment.
The Learn component has both push and pull aspects of learning – the push being the foundation of compliance and organizational training, and the pull being all the engaging and intuitive ways that learners can bring in content for themselves or for others. Learn Amp has taken widgets to the next level with high configurability and expanded usability.
Finally, by focusing on learning journeys, Learn Amp makes it possible for organizations to engage multiple audiences and measure the impact of learning on performance and retention. A well-managed journey will make all the difference to how quickly people understand the business, whether that's employees or customers.
More Information on Learn Amp
Now that you've read our Learn Amp review, you can learn more by becoming a free Basic Member of the Talented Learning Center:
- Learn Amp Living Profile – See all the Talented Learning independent research on Learn Amp.
- Demonstration and Executive Briefing – Learn about the Learn Amp solution as well as get a solid demo from COO Joe Hill-Wilson.
- Hot Take Video with John Leh – Hear what I think about Learn Amp in 5 minutes or less.
- Learn Amp Client Case Studies – Check out what Learn Amp client's Loreal, Black Tomato and others are doing.
- Visit learnamp.com
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About the Author: John Leh
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