Learning management systems (LMSs) play an important role in any company’s learning and development initiatives.
They help keep the workforce at peak performance by providing them with the right online training.
LMS workflow automation features help streamline processes, remove the hassle of manual repetitive tasks, eliminate the incidence of human error, and increase overall efficiency.
Be it for new employee onboarding, upskilling or reskilling, compliance training, sales enablement, and more, LMS workflow automation also helps provide better overall learning experiences.
In this article, we’ll be going over seven ways training software automation features can save you time and resources, and allow your team to focus on other key areas of the business.
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of April 22nd, 2024.
1. Create user groups based on rules you configure
A good example of LMS workflow automation is to separate learners into different groups based on customizable rules and variables.
For example, administrators, instructors, and other L&D professionals can create individual user groups based on user attributes such as job roles, department, hire date, experience, geographical location, language, and more.
The benefit of this feature is that companies can associate group members with specific content assignment rules and criteria.
This way, they can enhance the user experience and create personalized learning paths with training courses geared specifically toward learners in those user groups.
Example:
To give you a possible use case for this workflow automation feature, let’s say you create a “Sales” group, which includes everyone who’s part of the sales team.
You can also narrow it down by adding multiple roles such as Chicago Sales Team New Hires. This group would contain all new sales employees in the Chicago area.
By tracking these customizable rules for each user, stakeholders can automate the process of identifying each user segment.
This feature is a must for any good LMS and you should include it in your Request for Proposal (RFP).
It’s generally good practice to consider all possible ways employees can be grouped.
By assigning different user attributes to individual learners, you can automatically mix and match employees with relevant online courses based on the criteria you’ve selected.
It will greatly enhance the flexibility of your training programs and will ensure that all employees receive the same high level of training that perfectly matches their needs.
2. Auto-assign or enroll users in courses or learning plans
After creating the above-mentioned user groups based on your preferred rules and user attributes, you can also set up automated user enrollments in various online courses or down personalized learning paths.
Administrators can do this by setting triggers whenever certain actions take place.
This information is usually stored in each individual user’s profile and can include things like onboarding and offboarding, relocation to a different office, promotion to a new role, after completing a certain course, once a certification expires, etc.
This automation process ensures that learners always receive the right training, are up-to-date on the latest information, and are compliant with the latest rules and regulations.
It will also save the company time and resources by not having to manually enroll every employee in their appropriate courses.
Example:
For instance, someone in human resources added a new user to the LMS immediately after the hiring process.
The new employee will be introduced into a user group called “New Hires.”
Admins can set up enrollment rules that all users in said group will be automatically assigned the appropriate onboarding courses or learning path designed for their position.
Once these initial courses are complete, the system will trigger based on another set of rules and will automatically enroll the new hire in compliance training courses, for example.
While this is an example of automating employee onboarding, this feature can be extended to all areas of the organization’s training programs.
3. Import customers or leads from your CRM to your LMS
Many professional LMSs can integrate with popular customer management systems (CRMs).
This is great news for sales teams as it can empower them to do their jobs better and give access to sales enablement content they can share with clients in the pipeline.
With Docebo as a sales enablement LMS, for example.
Companies can integrate it with a variety of CRMs such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and several others.
They can use this LMS-CRM integration to auto-assign customers appropriate courses, training materials, and other assets as part of their customer onboarding process.
Example:
Let’s say your sales team is working with Salesforce as their primary CRM.
If you integrate it with an LMS like Docebo, you can automatically create learner profiles based on new or existing contacts and accounts in your Salesforce database.
You can automatically enroll them in appropriate courses about how to use your product or service, best practices, webinars, video tutorials, and more.
There are many benefits to customer education and this automation feature will only facilitate them faster and easier.
Take for example PowerDMS, a renowned public safety workforce platform designed to recruit, train, equip, and protect first responders.
They needed an LMS that was powerful enough to scale with their growing customer base.
After partnering with Docebo and syncing it with Salesforce, they were able to decrease their average customer onboarding time by 30 percent, save over 5,400 training hours, increase their ROI by 119 percent, and save over $150,000 in training costs.
4. Certification and training deadline reminders
Any LMS for employee training needs to include a certification and recertification feature. It also needs to be able to send out automated reminders on training-related deadlines.
This is particularly important when it comes to compliance training. Depending on the sector they operate in, organizations often have to prove that their workforce complies with all industry regulations.
Some certifications also have expiration dates that may require continuing education (CE) credits or other activities to be completed to maintain their validity.
This LMS workflow automation feature sends reminders to all relevant learners in the training platform’s database, ensuring that they are always on top of their training.
Example:
You have a five-star restaurant and need to adhere to strict health and safety regulations.
You can set rules for how long certifications are valid and how long before the system should send out automated reminders regarding their expiration date.
This gives employees enough time to recertify for the health and safety course.
However, it often happens that the recertification training process follows a different path than the original certification.
If new employees need three months to complete the original course, for example, they may only require a week or so for a recertification refresher course.
Doing all of this by hand and for each individual employee is incredibly tedious, time-consuming, and highly prone to human error.
Yet, by automating it, admins only need to set the rules and parameters once and let the LMS do the rest.
5. Distribute LMS information to third-party apps
One of the main advantages of LMS integrations with the company’s existing tech stack is that they can break up data silos and centralize knowledge in a unified location.
This helps with data analytics, reporting, getting a comprehensive view of the entire organization, and better overall decision-making.
Companies can also create unified workflows with other tools in their tech stack to send and receive information.
Docebo, for example, integrates with over 400 third-party tools ranging from CRMs to content management, customer experience, sales, marketing, human resources information systems, e-commerce, video conferencing, and more.
Example:
For instance, when a learner completes a course and earns a certificate, the information is automatically uploaded to the company’s HR system.
The human resources team will then be able to update the user’s profile information or job description reflecting the new certification.
Alternatively, companies can also sync their LMS with their CRM, like in the previous example, and generate new contacts into Salesforce based on learner registrations in the LMS.
After Smartly.io partnered with Docebo, they were able to seamlessly integrate it with the rest of their tech stack, cutting down on hundreds of hours of tedious, manual tasks, and allowing the team to focus on more valuable work instead.
6. Deactivate users after a certain period
With an LMS platform like Docebo, you can set different user statuses for each individual learner.
Users can be:
- Active – those who have access to at least one course, training material, or learning module.
- Activated – those who have access to the training platform but have not yet received access to any courses or training materials.
- Deactivated – those who no longer have access to the platform and have been manually deactivated by the platform’s administrator.
- Expired – those users who no longer have access to the platform because they reached an expiration date set by the admin.
You can automatically configure users to deactivate after a set period, restricting their access to the LMS, which eliminates the need to do so manually.
Example:
A user is set to stop using the LMS after a given date.
Administrators can set up automated deactivation protocols to set the user as “expired”, denying them access to the platform and possibly making room for a new user to take their place.
7. Set up automated reporting
Regular reports play a critical role in the well-being of any organization, regardless of its size, scope, or industry.
Robust and customizable LMS reporting capabilities can keep all stakeholders updated at all times about key areas of the learning and development process.
They can also highlight any bottlenecks or potential problem areas that need improvement, compare different training styles and methodologies, and more.
Admins can schedule automated reports at different stages of the e-learning process such as when new users are enrolled in a course, or after completing a module, earning a certificate, etc.
They can be sent automatically via email to all relevant stakeholders.
Example:
Companies can use learner surveys to gather feedback at key stages of the e-learning process and discover useful trends and insights.
Admins can set automated surveys prior to a course, for example, to understand learners’ needs and expectations. They can also add one after learners have completed the course, to see whether it was engaging enough for them or met their expectations generally.
Admins can then have automated survey result reports to interpret users’ answers and have them automatically sent via email to all relevant stakeholders.
Start automating your workflows
LMS workflow automation features are a great way to streamline employee training processes, improve learning experiences, and save time and resources while doing so.
With a bit of initial setup, they are often set-and-forget, trigger-based actions that have the potential to benefit both learners and the admins behind the scenes.
Docebo is one LMS that provides all seven types of workflow automation processes we’ve presented here.
If you want to test them out and see how they work for you, feel free to schedule a demo today and you’ll be on your way in no time.