Using LMS Automations to Decrease Administrative Time

Have you ever served as the administrator for a learning management system (LMS)?

If not, the amount of day-to-day administration required to keep one running might surprise you. An LMS at a small company might need little daily upkeep, but some large companies have a full-time admin. These administrators upload courses, manage users and permissions, generate reports, troubleshoot technical issues, and much more.

Whether or not you have a full-time LMS administrator, it's in your best interest to make LMS administration as efficient as possible. Automating certain tasks within your LMS lets your learning and development team focus on the parts of their job that require more attention, like course planning and creating new training materials.

Here are eight ways to decrease administrative time using LMS automations:

1. Automate new hire onboarding

With automated onboarding, creating a new employee in your HR system or adding an email address to a database could automatically enroll them in their first training. This saves administrators a step in the pre-onboarding phase.

This type of automation can continue enrolling learners in the next course in their program as soon as they finish a training. Administrators don't have to worry about keeping tabs on where everyone is in the training process, because the LMS will take care of enrolling them in their next course automatically.

Of course, for this to work without using an external script or service, you'll need to integrate your HR system and your LMS. That's the next tip.

2. Integrate with HR systems

HR systems like Oracle and Workday often store large amounts of useful information. Employee details like name, date of birth, department, role, supervisor, and start date are kept there.

These pieces of information are often important in the training process, and making a mistake in entering them into your LMS could cause administrative headaches down the road. Printing a certificate with a misspelled name, enrolling an employee in the wrong team's training, or sending training results to the wrong manager require troubleshooting that will take more of your admin's time.

It's easy to make a mistake like this when you're copying and pasting a lot of information. But there's a better way.

LMS integration with HR systems means you can automatically import the information stored there. This saves your administrators the time and effort it would take to manually copy information between your HR software and your LMS. It also reduces errors.

As a bonus, you can also move information from your LMS to your HR system. For example, if your HR system stores whether or not an employee has completed compliance training, you could automatically update this information when a learning path is complete.

3. Schedule LMS reports

Administrators often run a lot of valuable LMS reports. They report on how many employees have completed training, whether learners are behind schedule, the results of post-training surveys, and a lot more. All of this reporting can take a lot of time.

Fortunately, most learning management systems include scheduled reporting features. Set up the reports you want to see regularly and your administrators will get the reports on the schedule that makes sense for your organization (probably weekly or monthly).

If you're interested in reporting, be sure to check out our Custom Report Builder, which will unlock a new level of efficiency analytics and insights for your learning and development program.

4. Reduce compliance training stress

Compliance training is often higher-stakes than other types of training. A particular type of training may be legally mandated in your field. Or you could need to ensure that your employees know how to keep your products or content compliant. Whatever type of compliance training you're doing, it's crucial that it's delivered reliably and on time.

Without automation, that means relying on your administrators to assign training, monitor user progress, review assessments, and more. With automated compliance training, you can save all of that time while ensuring you don't miss any steps.

By creating learning paths that cover the materials in the compliance training, administrators will just need to assign the training to the people who need it. Your LMS will take care of the rest...

5. Enroll employees into learning paths

If you've written instructions for training in the past, you're probably familiar with this situation:

One training video is in a shared drive folder. Another is hosted on the company YouTube channel. One PDF got emailed out to all course participants, while another is on the company drive. Assigned readings are all over the place. You have to write out directions so everyone knows where to find their training materials at the right time. And that doesn't even get into manual user progress tracking.

Automated learning paths solve this problem. Your LMS will automatically deliver the next piece of training content – in whatever form it is – to the people who need it next. Whether it's a video, a live online training, a document, an audio file, or anything else, learners will get it at the right time.

Doesn't that sound like it could save hours of administration?

Be sure to check out this article on Continu's Journeys feature and see how we make learning paths easy and automatic.

6. Attach assessments to courses

Without automation, making sure every learner gets the right assessment at the right time can be a nightmare. LMS Administrators need to keep track of where everyone is in their course, administer the assessment when it's time, and determine the results. With a handful of people, this might not be a big deal, but as your company grows it will be an increasingly significant waste of time.

Assessment automation through your LMS solves this problem. By attaching an assessment to a particular course, learners get assessed as soon as they're done with the training. No need for an administrator to track everyone's progress or set up notifications for when someone has finished a training.

Your LMS will also score the assessment and track scores for all of the learners in the course, giving you great insight into whether employees are retaining information. You can also get automated reports on assessment completion and scores.

You can even create auto-generated certificates if someone passes their final assessment. No need to create a new PDF every time someone finishes their course!

7. Set up email notifications

While the automations above largely remove the need for email notification systems, there are some cases in which you might want them.

For example, you might want to know whenever someone completes your longest training course so you can recognize them in your next staff meeting. Or you could request an automated email every time someone fails an assessment so you can work with them one-on-one. Or when an employee leaves negative feedback about a course.

Depending on the priorities in your learning and development program, you may request all sorts of automated emails from your LMS.

8. Provide self-directed learning opportunities

Self-directed learning is an effective way to increase employee engagement and could boost retention. But effectively instituting a self-directed learning program takes time. In addition to the resources you have for your compliance or required training, you'll need new courses and someone to manage them.

Automation can be a huge help here.

You'll still need to have the content necessary to build out the trainings you'll offer on a self-directed basis. But once you've automated training enrollment, learning paths, assessments, and other functions of your LMS, additional offerings add very little workload.

These are relatively minor compared to the administrative time it would take if you didn't automate the process.

This is an advanced tip, so don't worry too much about self-directed learning until you've automated the more necessary parts of your training process. Once you have, though, think about setting up a self-service learning portal for your employees to start taking agency in their training.

Use LMS automations to help your admins be more efficient

Learning management system administrators – whether they're full-time or sharing responsibilities with another role – have a lot to do. Even when things are running smoothly, there's plenty of administration to do.

Why take up their time with things that could be automated?

By automating the enrollment process, information exchange with HR systems, reporting, compliance training, email notifications, and more, your LMS can save your administrators a significant amount of time.

If LMS automations are a high priority for you, be sure to ask for a free demo of Continu! We'll walk you through the process and show you the most useful automations for your organization.