The business value of employee learning and development is proven out time after time.
Nearly every employee (94%) is likely to stay at a company for longer if their employer invests in their development; roughly half of working professionals would switch to another job if it offered better training opportunities; and a whopping 92% of companies that foster a strong learning culture are more likely to be rewarded with innovative products.
Given these data points, it’s perhaps little surprise that HR teams are getting more budget for learning and development (L&D) this year.
To make the most of your organization’s growing investments in L&D, you can integrate your learning management system (LMS) with other applications in your tech stack.
We’ll share several worthwhile integrations, as well as the benefits that come with implementing them. But to start, let’s define LMS integration.
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What is LMS integration?
It’s when a learning management system is connected to another application, either natively or by a 3rd party, like an integration platform as a service. Once connected, data can flow between the applications in real-time or in time-based batches.
LMS integration use cases
Here are just a few valuable applications of LMS integration.
Send a post-onboarding assessment
To gauge your onboarding program’s efficacy, and to better determine whether employees are ready to carry out their responsibilities, you can send them an assessment as soon as they’re officially “onboarded.”
This simply involves integrating your HRIS with your LMS and business communications platform (e.g. Slack) and then implementing the following:
1. Once an employee reaches their 60th day* at your company, as determined by your HRIS, the workflow gets triggered.
Note: We’re assuming that an employee is considered fully onboarded once 60 days have passed from their initial start date.
2. Based on the department that employee works in (and potentially even their role), your LMS sends them a quiz via your business communications platform.
3. As soon as the new hire completes the assessment, their manager gets notified of the results, as does your L&D team via a specific channel.
Provide learning opportunities to customer-facing employees within your CRM
Your customer-facing employees can benefit from learning opportunities in a number of ways. Perhaps they can better understand the tools they’re using, your organization’s best practices for engaging prospects or clients, or even your platform’s features and value propositions.
Whatever learning opportunities you want to provide, you can deliver them through the tool these employees likely use already—your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. That way, they can quickly find their courses and apply their learnings as soon as they complete any.
To provide courses within your CRM, you can simply connect your LMS with your CRM. From there, you can add any courses to the latter, and whenever a course gets modified, the changes can automatically be reflected in your CRM.
Gain in-depth insights by adding your training data to your BI tool
The analytics capabilities provided by your LMS, while valuable, likely fall short of what you and your team needs.
Whether you’re looking to uncover learners’ knowledge gaps or pin down a training initiative’s impact, you’ll likely want to use a more robust, purpose-built analytics solution—like a BI platform. To help facilitate this, you can simply integrate your LMS with your BI tool and then build a workflow where any completed assessments are automatically added to the latter. You can even take it a step further by adding completed assessments to a specific dashboard or report, allowing you to analyze the results faster.
Remind employees to take trainings
Your organization likely provides certain trainings that are necessary in maintaining compliance with specific laws and regulations.
To ensure every employee completes these trainings on time (and therefore keeps your business compliant), you can integrate your LMS with your business communications platform and email service provider, and design the following streamlined workflow:
1. Once an employee fails to complete a specific training by a certain timeframe, the workflow gets triggered.
2. The employee receives a message via an app like Slack, reminding them to complete it and providing them with the deadline for doing so.
3. In case the employee checks their emails more frequently, they’ll also see a reminder email with the same information that’s presented in the Slack message.
Monetize your courses
In the event that you want to offer courses to clients or partners, you can easily monetize them by integrating your LMS with a platform like Shopify. You can then add your courses to your ecommerce store, where anyone can review and purchase them. In addition, as your courses evolve, the changes can be reflected in your ecommerce store in real-time—ensuring that prospective buyers can review and purchase the latest versions.
Provide your LMS with single sign-on (SSO)
Having employees log into individual applications with their usernames and passwords can be a headache. It forces employees to keep track of their login credentials for each application; and even then, they’ll likely have to reset their passwords frequently.
In the context of accessing your LMS, these issues can discourage employees from logging into the system and, therefore, makes them all the more likely to avoid their courses.
You can avoid these issues altogether by integrating your LMS with an SSO provider, like Okta. Once connected, employees can log into your LMS through the authentication method of your choosing, making the process simple for employees and safe for your business.
Why is LMS integration important?
Given these use cases, you can likely pin down a number of benefits from integrating your LMS. In case any skip your attention, we’ll cover several below.
Reduce human errors
In the absence of an integrated LMS, your team is forced to perform extensive tasks manually. This can be updating an employee’s status for completing a specific training within your HRIS, adding a specific test result to your BI platform, etc.
These data entry-based activities are prone to human errors that, if not caught on time, can lead to significant adverse consequences. For example, an employee who failed to complete mandatory training may inadvertently be on the list of those who’ve passed it in your HRIS. This can prevent them from receiving any reminders to complete it, and, as a result, your organization is less likely to be compliant with whatever laws or regulations that training satisfies.
LMS integration by and large prevents human errors from taking place, as any updates typically won’t require human intervention.
Provide an enhanced learning experience
By providing courses and training in the platforms your employees already use, you’re allowing them to avoid hopping between applications to access any. This saves them both time and effort in terms of finding the ones they need to take.
Moreover, by analyzing results in more depth, your L&D team and managers can do a better job of uncovering opportunities for improving their training and courses. Assuming they implement these findings, your employees will be rewarded with more impactful, personalized, and enjoyable learning experiences over time.
Help your business stay compliant
Whether your organization needs employees to pass a training on sexual harassment to maintain compliance with their state or one that allows you to comply with a federal law, like HIPAA, LMS integration can help.
Aside from providing timely reminders to employees, LMS integration allows HR and managers to more easily discover employees who still haven’t completed any required training—empowering them to reach out to these employees directly. These additional reminders should go a long way in helping your team avoid costly violations, both in terms of required payments and reputational damages.
Integrate your LMS with the rest of your tech stack by using Workato
Workato, the leader in enterprise automation, offers API-based, pre-built connectors to hundreds of applications—including SAP Litmos, Shopify, Slack, Okta, and Salesforce—, allowing your teams to integrate their applications quickly and without needing to write a single line of code. The platform also offers hundreds of thousands of automation templates, all but ensuring that your team can ideate and implement impactful workflow automations.
