LMS trends

Digital innovation is making it easier than ever to support commercial training strategies, so companies of every size and industry segment are discovering how learning programs can fuel growth and profitability.

Despite competitive pressure to keep price points lower, we expect licensing levels to continue drifting upwards, as vendors attempt to demonstrate value-add that differentiates their offerings.

Recognizing the futility of direct competition, specialty LMS vendors learned to focus on a particular audience, industry or other factors where they now claim competence and fight for customers in that niche.

Extended enterprise LMS stakeholders were proving that learning initiatives make a legitimate business impact by comparing trained vs. untrained audiences on metrics like sales volume, customer satisfaction, retention and lifetime value.

Under the hood, commercial LMSs must be tightly integrated with a full stack of robust, reliable, complementary technologies that support end-to-end business operations.

Corporate learning organizations need to harness this just-in-time use of crowdsourced knowledge and integrate it with formal course content.  

If training departments don't step up, extended enterprise learning sponsors move forward on their own -- often duplicating technology, content and effort.

It's still early, but perhaps one of the most interesting opportunities is coming from the association space, where gamification and digital badges are being used to help bridge the skills gap.

The problem with the global employee learning solutions market is that the big, boring talent management LMSs we just mentioned are the standard for managing enterprise-wide learning complexity. 

 These "all purpose" LMS platforms are used to deliver, support and measure online and classroom training programs for any combination of employees, channel partners, dealers, franchisees, customers, business prospects and others.