More than 35% of the world’s population now uses smartphones!
While that is a metric you might have expected, with the tremendous growth in technology and mobile adoption in the past few years, there is more to it.
More and more businesses are moving towards mobility across verticals, with employee learning being another vertical impacted by this trend. Your employees are now used to consuming knowledge across devices, and thus, it is critical that your organization focuses on mobile-first content delivery platforms.
First things first, let’s try to understand the current model, LMS, and a mobile-first content delivery platform.
Difference Between Mobile-First Content Delivery Platform and LMS
When you as an organization plan to impart training across teams and geographies, here are some factors to be considered:
- Consistency in training
- Personalized training for each employee
- Fast and efficient deployment
This is where you consider a Learning Management System (LMS), that helps you track, manage, and deliver training content. It has been widely adopted by enterprises over the last decade, continuously assisting businesses in driving online learning for their employees.
But in the last few years, a few more points have come forward as key contributors to decision making:
- Flexibility to access content anytime
- Better user experience to drive retention
- Availability to improve the completion rate
This is where a Mobile-First LMS or a mobile-first content delivery platform comes into the picture, making content easily accessible via mobile devices. It has completely redefined the convenience aspect when it comes to web-based training for your employees.
Which One Is Best for You: LMS or Mobile-First Content Delivery Platform?
Let’s look at the trends and user behaviors that make the current LMS seem a bit dated and will also become key to your decision.
- A whopping 88%of people are looking to switch from their current LMS because of a need for improved user experience.
- Millennial employees expect a flexible learning system that gives them some degree of control, which is something that existing LMS cannot offer.
- LMS doesn’t offer much when it comes to interactive teaching. Most LMS have a one-way training program that doesn’t let employees actively participate and thus fail to impart the necessary skills effectively.
- Personalization is key to a successful training program. And an LMS offers the same structured program to all employees, irrespective of whether they are engaging with the content or not.
- Learners expect to access the content at all times, and with the significant improvement in travel times for employees, they can use the same productively for personal growth.
- Microlearning, which is a leading trend in e-Learning, is based on the methodology of delivering training over short but useful chunk of information. Thus, increasing the need for an on-the-go LMS to improve upon the completion rates.
- The new-gen employees are more accustomed to using mobile phones when it comes to games or interacting with communities. Both gamification and the social aspect are key trends in e-Learning and impact the adoption of LMS in your organization equally.
These are just some of the points to consider when finding the perfect fit for your organization.
But here’s the thing, a mobile-first LMS addresses all of these aspects and provides a comprehensive and accessible LMS solution. It has everything:
- Interactive user interface
- Personalized programs
- Partial control to learners
- A collaborative atmosphere for the instructors
- Offline accessibility of content
- Accessible anywhere, anytime
- Easy content updates
- Gamification
- Microlearning approach
- On-demand learning
Smartphone users are impatient. So much so that 30% of people leave a website if it doesn’t load within 6 to 10 seconds, and 3% do not even wait for as long as a second!
Therefore, when you are building a content platform for learning purposes, it is vital that you use a mobile-friendly system that lets employees access the content from anywhere via their smartphones easily.
Transforming the Learning Experience with a Mobile-First Content Delivery Platform
The final stage of any decision-making process is actually executing it.
Here’s precisely how you will observe the shift from an LMS to a mobile-first content delivery platform.
- You need to find the right vendor with the necessary capabilities, in terms of customizable solutions.
- The infrastructure can be on your Enterprise cloud or SaaS-based managed approach of hosting.
- You need to understand the current gaps, need for material, customization as per the user experience on mobile devices to help your users take charge of the learning process actively.
- Once done, migrate the courses and content to the new infrastructure with support from your delivery platform partner.
- Next, customize your platform for organization-specific training workflow and user hierarchy, for improved effectiveness.
- If you do not have a white-label solution, you must consider the same as it helps in talent branding.
The transition to a mobile-first content delivery model will lead to the following:
- A planned content delivery platform will enable you to launch training modules anytime and anywhere, globally.
- Capability to explore, track, and measure all your training on a single platform.
- The perfect blend of virtual, classroom, and mobile-first content delivery platform, can lead to higher engagement, retention, and course completion rate.
Conclusion
A content delivery platform aims to provide personalized content that piques the curiosity of the learners. They have richer content with an adaptable interface that is not bound by strict systems, as is the case in most LMS. A mobile-first content delivery/digital publishing platform is perfect for organizations that want to provide the best possible learning experience and exercise complete control and freedom over it.
Related:
Benefits of a Mobile-First LMS Platform in Employee Training
Benefits & Use Cases of Mobile Learning in Enterprise Training
6 Ways to Use Mobile Learning to Enhance Employee Productivity
Supercharge Your Employee Training Program with Bite Sized Learning