Managing upskilling, facilitating reskilling, and delivering training for thousands of workers is no small task, and out-of-the-box learning solutions often aren't equipped to handle the complex needs of major enterprises. A dedicated enterprise LMS can simplify L&D processes and ensure large organizations achieve their learning and training goals. In this blog post, you’ll discover six features an enterprise learning management system (LMS) needs to have to be effective.

Not all workforce learning and training platforms are created equal. Some systems are ideal for small and medium-sized businesses while others cater to more sophisticated or complex enterprises. Implementing a system that isn’t right for the scale, complexity, and specifics of your organization’s professional development and compliance training needs will lead to headaches and frustration. It’s best to take your time and ensure that you’re selecting an LMS that’s specifically designed for enterprise learning and includes the following six features.

READ MORE | ‘Compliance Training Essentials for Highly Regulated Industries’

1) Advanced Course Management and Streamlined Content Delivery

The ability to effectively manage course content is arguably the most important feature of any training platform. Managing training content and L&D materials for thousands of users can be a daunting task, especially if your workforce is spread across multiple regions or even continents. Your organization’s LMS needs to make it easy to manage and streamline content delivery and help ease the burden for your L&D team. Every learner should have seamless access to the tools they need to grow and support your organization’s goals, and a robust LMS will empower your users to upskill and reskill without disrupting their productivity.

Additionally, your LMS should easily integrate with third-party content providers and learning partners. This is especially important if your organization prefers to purchase off-the-shelf courses. Whether you’re designing your own content or using third-party solutions, the right enterprise LMS should also act as a central hub for all of your learning materials to ensure that your content stays organized and easily accessible.

2) Compliance Training Management for Highly Regulated Industries

Consider how the software will help you manage your industry-specific compliance regulations. Every organization has its own protocols and compliance training requirements, but organizations in highly regulated industries will additionally need to adhere to strict standards and procedures to operate safely. The complexities of your industry will dictate not only your compliance training needs, but certain record-keeping rules that must also be observed.

For example, food and beverage manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and clinical laboratories that are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must adhere to Title 21 CFR Part 11. Similarly, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device firms in the European Union must adhere to GMP Annex 11. These regulations establish the compliance requirements for electronic records and signatures. Organizations depend on the use of electronic signatures to prevent business slowdowns, but they must adhere to strict rules regarding these digital records. To maintain compliance, these organizations must record, validate, and audit their compliance data. If your organization is subject to these extensive processes, having a compliance-minded LMS is essential.

Your LMS should also have extensive auditing capabilities, including audit logs that indicate:

• When specific actions within your organization’s systems take place
• Who initiated the actions and the time at which they occurred
• How the actions relate to an overall chain of events

Most learning software allows you to generate reports, but not all reports offer the same level of detail and customization to help you clearly indicate which employees are up to date with their training courses and who has had access to your systems. Choosing an LMS capable of auditing which users have completed training, who has accessed the system, and who has made changes ensures that you’re ready to provide regulators with up-to-the-minute records that prove your organization’s compliance and protect your workforce.

GET THE FACTS ABOUT CFR 21 PART 11 COMPLIANCE | CFR 21 Part 11 Frequently Asked Questions

3) Personalized Learning Journeys and Knowledge Retention Monitoring

While compliance management is essential for your organization to operate effectively, L&D priorities are shifting. The majority of L&D professionals—89%—agree that building employee skills will help companies navigate the evolving future of work, and research from Fosway Group found that upskilling and reskilling was the top strategic priority for L&D professionals in 2024. Your LMS needs to include features that improve your knowledge retention efforts, ensuring employees have the tools they’ll need to master new skills and adapt to your changing workforce needs.

Look for a platform with personalized learning journeys that connect employees’ professional development courses to their job functions and career aspirations. This helps employees understand how their learning courses help them improve specific skills and how mastering those skills connects to their individual career growth (as well as your organizational goals).

Your LMS should also include multiple methods of assessment and tracking to ensure you’re testing your learners’ knowledge retention and tracking key metrics over time. A robust exam engine allows you to track comprehension of large courses and topics while maintaining compliance. On the other hand, quizzes and check-ins provide quick ways of evaluating knowledge on specific skills or topics. Both of these methods allow you to better understand the effectiveness of your training programs over time. You can use this data to track trends and make enhancements to your content to improve knowledge retention rates.

4) Seamless Automated Communication

Look for an LMS that makes communication as frictionless as possible. Employees need to be able to complete their training with minimal disruptions to their daily job duties, and being unable to move forward in a learning module or program can cause unnecessary frustration and delays. Choose an LMS that is capable of automating standard communications and actions to ensure that your users can continue their learning and training activities efficiently.

A robust enterprise LMS should allow users to move on to the next course in a training program once they’ve met or surpassed a specific learning threshold. For example, your LMS administrator could configure your platform to allow users to automatically begin the next course in a sequence once they’ve earned at least an 80% on the previous assessment.

Highly configurable platforms can also send automatic email reminders to users who need to renew specific certifications. These automatic communications ensure that users can continue to progress in their training programs, enhance their skills, and maintain essential credentials required for your organization’s compliance obligations.

READ MORE TIPS FOR STREAMLINING L&D PROCESSES | ‘4 Ways AI Can Refine and Scale Your Skills Enablement Strategies’

5) Advanced Reporting and Real-Time Insights

If you want to understand the effectiveness of your learning initiatives and make meaningful enhancements to your programs, then you’ll need an LMS with configurable reporting and analytics features. Most platforms have basic reporting features as standard, so look for an enterprise LMS that offers real-time analytics and configurable reports. Customizing your reports can show you the data that’s most relevant to your organization’s needs, such as:

• Course completion, certifications, competencies, and assessment results
• Skills gap identification to show workers where they stand
• Targeted training courses to help close knowledge gaps

You might find it helpful to run the same report multiple times to compare performance results over time. Choose an LMS that lets you automatically schedule your reports and securely send them to the appropriate users. This ensures that the relevant stakeholders receive consistent, reliable L&D data so they can make informed decisions for the future.

6) Customization and Configurability—Especially for Administrators

Small and mid-sized organizations can likely accomplish their L&D goals with a learning platform’s in-the-box features, but major enterprises often require more advanced options for configuring platforms to fit their unique needs. Choose an enterprise LMS that allows you to customize the look and feel of your system’s interface. This gives your administrators the flexibility they need to accomplish organizational goals while ensuring your LMS instance emulates your corporate brand.

A highly configurable learning platform will allow you to customize or configure things like:

• Systems settings
• Notification rules and triggers
• In-depth permissioning and user roles

Inquire about the breadth and depth of your potential platform’s configurability. In addition to creating and defining user roles, your enterprise platform should include granular controls for tailoring administrative, manager, and user privileges to your organization’s specific requirements. Your platform should also be able to support multiple language needs to ensure you’re able to successfully deliver learning and training materials to your global learners in their native languages.