Why You Need an LMS for Your In-House Safety Training

How many hours out of your week does your in-house safety training program eat-up?

If you’re living in Excel spreadsheets, tracking down your employees for progress reports, and dealing with tech issues one after the other, your safety training program is taking up too much of your time. Your safety training program should work for you, not against you. Investing in a Learning Management System (LMS) can save you time best spent on more pressing issues.

LMS 101

Learning Management Systems have been around for decades. They’re a fairly recent arrival to the transportation industry, though. So, if you’re like most safety training folks, you could probably use a little break down of what an LMS is.

First and foremost, a learning management system is a delivery platform for your company’s education and training. It hosts your safety training courses, plays videos, and utilizes gamification like interactive quizzes and educational activities.

An LMS not only hosts your education and training materials, but it helps you manage them as well. You can assign training to specific employees, track their progress and usage, and give certificates of completion for employees who pass.

Finally, an LMS is a computer system. In other words, it’s a software program just like Powerpoint or Outlook. Powerpoint creates slideshows, Outlook sends emails, and an LMS organizes and delivers your company’s training materials.

Why Your Life is Difficult Without an LMS

Safety training is an essential part of any transportation company. However, without an LMS, your employee education and training takes up a lot more time, money, and resources than necessary.

eBook Download: 8 Light Duty Training Courses You Can Use at Your Safety Meetings

Currently, depending on your operation size, you probably make your safety training materials and send them out to your managers for them to conduct training. Your managers host the training meetings and report back to you which employees were in attendance and which were absent.

This is a common practice for small to medium sized companies. However, it presents several problems:

• It takes a lot of time to create the training materials
• You will spend a lot of time communicating back and forth with managers
• Your managers may forget to send you who attended the training
• It is difficult and time consuming to keep track of which employees have attended the training

Learning Management Systems aren’t just for the big dogs anymore. There are many options available that have scaling prices for how big (or small) you are.

How an LMS Can Make Your Life Easier

You don’t have to accept the every-day challenges your safety training presents. A good LMS will save you so much time that it might pay for itself.

With an LMS, you can:

Create and host your own training content

A quality LMS allows you to easily create, host, and organize your own training content. These features should be built in and simple to understand. This means you will have standardized training across your company and everyone will know where to find it.

Host in-person or self-directed training

One of the best features of an LMS is that it takes your training online. Your employees will be able to access your training from any computer or smart device and take it as their schedule allows.

Alternatively, you can still host your training in-person. It works just like any other training session. Your employees hunker down and the instructor uses the LMS to lead the group.

Track employee progress and usage

With an LMS, you don’t have to live in Excel spreadsheets anymore. An LMS makes it easy to track your employees’ progress with training and education. The best ones allow you to run custom reports to see who’s completed what, who’s in the middle of their training, and who has yet to begin.

Easily communicate with all of your learners

You can communicate to everyone in the system with just a few clicks. You can send automated messages when employees are assigned training courses. You can email employees to remind them that they need to complete a course by the end of the week. Or, you can send out a mass email to let everyone know of a new feature. Mass communication has never been more simple.

Have Your Very Own Customer Support Team

The best-of-the-best LMS offers come with a support and development team. Your employees can email a support line to get quick help with their log-in info or with accessing a training module. You don’t have to be tech support anymore.

Streamline Your Training

Safety training and education is one of the most crucial parts of a transportation company. That doesn’t mean it has to take up all of your time, though. A learning management system takes care of all the hassle of set-up and communication. That way, you can focus on what really matters to you: safety meeting content.