HRMS Learning Management: The Final Piece of the Puzzle

Do you have a robust Learning Management (LMS) application or module within your HRMS? Is this data considered critical to your employee development and succession planning? Often HRMS learning management data is considered a ‘later phase’ item which many companies never get around to implementing. What type of benefits come from capturing and maintaining this data, is it worth the effort?

A Holistic Employee Overview

The training and education data kept about an employee can be very important for long term planning within an organization, as well as to further an employee’s own career. Having an employee’s training or certification history together with all of the other employee details can enable better decision making from a workforce planning perspective, without the need to cobble together files from various sources. In particular, where certain data elements allow for better employee development, it’s this holistic employee overview that is often missing in many companies.

Skills and Competencies – Are They overrated?

Public sector tends to excel in this area: analyzing jobs and positions to provide a full breakdown of needed skills and competencies to perform a role. Employees and candidates are also measured in their attainment of these items. In the private sector, business is much more fluid and HR often has a different focus. So many HRMS or LMS offer functionality to match employees and candidates against job requirements, including future matching to identify succession planning gaps. But how many of us outside of a government role ever see this data used? It may exist at the highest levels but HRMS learning management is rarely used across the board.

Work Experience on Internal Projects

One of the key benefits of having HRMS learning management functionality that tracks prior experience is that you can directly perform data mining on your own population. Employees often develop skills from internal projects, but as managers change, we lose the connection. If you can capture this data in your HRMS or LMS, it can be a veritable gold mine. This is particularly the case if you’re looking for something specific, such as an Engineer who worked on launch XYZ, as an upcoming project bears many similarities to that earlier one. Without learning management, you’re resigned to sending emails, contacting old managers and searching through old paperwork to try and find out who was on the project at the time. Cases like these are why learning management is always worth the effort.