Powerful Reasons to Use Your LMS for Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding is a big task: New hires need to learn information and skills particular to their job roles — and all new hires need to learn about the company’s values and culture, meet their coworkers, fill out endless forms, learn essential safety procedures … and much more. Your best ally in this process is your learning management system (LMS). Using your LMS for employee onboarding can streamline the process, improve results, and save a lot of stress — both for the new hires and for the training team!

Leverage your LMS for employee onboarding

Some organizations onboard dozens or even hundreds of employees at a time. These organizations are increasingly turning to online training for some or all of the onboarding training that they used to do using instructor-led, in-person classes.

Moving online training to your LMS for employee onboarding offers 5 significant benefits:

It’s consistent

With instructor-led training, the learner’s experience and the content varies by instructor. Deploying your learning management system for onboarding ensures that all employees get the same high-quality content, same outstanding learner experience, and consistent messaging about company culture, values, and priorities.

It’s scalable

Whether your new hires start as a cohort and train together or you bring them on one by one; whether you need to train 2, 10, or 2,000 employees, your LMS-based employee onboarding is ready to handle the demand. Unlike instructor-led training, the costs don’t go up with each new hire who has to travel for training or each new instructor you need to add.

It’s relevant

Your online training is easy to update, ensuring that new hires get current, relevant content. Even better, your LMS may let you bundle courses into learning plans that make it easy to deliver the right onboarding training to each learner, according to their job role.

It’s accessible

Employees can use the training anywhere, anytime. You can easily build in accessibility features that make your online employee onboarding materials easily usable to all learners, regardless of disability, technical savvy, prior experience and knowledge, or even native language.

It’s trackable

Employee onboarding with online training is super-easy to track. Your training admins can follow each learner’s progress, know when people have finished their training, generate reports for their managers or for compliance regulators, and more. Your team can even track training that doesn’t take place in the LMS, such as virtual classroom sessions and asynchronous microlearning.  

A strategic approach to new employee onboarding

Leveraging your LMS for employee onboarding does not lock you in to any particular approach to training your new hires. You can — and should — blend synchronous and asynchronous online training in multiple formats and using a variety of delivery mechanisms. Your LMS makes this easy. Here’s one example of a typical onboarding strategy that takes advantage of powerful LMS features:

Before onboarding begins

• Build a library of online training assets to guide new hires through processes like setting up their online accounts and profiles, signing up for benefits, and learning who does what.
• Create in-depth LMS-based courses, supported by your LMS’s knowledge base and curated content library, to teach complex role-specific knowledge and skills.
• Design learning plans or curriculum packages for key job roles, making it easy to enroll new hires into all of the training they need, all at once, and track their progress. 

During the onboarding experience

• Deliver LMS-based eLearning courses that introduce company culture and policies to all hires.
• Create automatic enrollments and reminders to ensure learners have the training they need and encourage learners to complete it in a timely manner.
• Let managers and other stakeholders know how training is progressing with custom reports, automatically generated and delivered weekly, or on a schedule you choose.
• When hiring dozens — or hundreds — of workers for the same job role, use efficient learning plans to enroll the entire cohort with a single click.

After your new employees complete their onboarding

• Provide ongoing access to a knowledge base, curated content shared by more experienced employees, and discussion boards where employees can ask company experts for help — all hosted by and accessible using your LMS.
• Follow up the longer eLearning courses with a drip-delivered review and retention program that uses microlearning; launch and track this from your LMS.

Use your SmarterU LMS to power new hires’ success

Get your newest employees off to a great start — and keep all employees’ skills sharp — with your SmarterU LMS. Move up to employee onboarding with online training, and let SmarterU help with every strategic step of your training plan. Our learning plans, custom dashboards and reports, and outstanding features support learners every step of the way, while creating an efficient and enjoyable experience for training administrators too.

Eager to learn more? Call on our experts today.