What’s Causing Low LMS Adoption Rates & What to Do About It

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We see it time and time again: A business introduces a new learning management system (LMS) to its HR deck, but it doesn’t have any impact on the company’s workforce. And when employee adoption of the new LMS is low, the new platform just feels like a wasted effort.

Low LMS adoption doesn’t have to be an insurmountable barrier, though. We’ll dive into how you can turn the common barriers to LMS adoption around and engage learners in development.

Common barriers to LMS adoption

You know the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? It’s a sentiment commonly held in the workforce and a large reason behind resistance to change management. Resistance causes about 39% of change programs to fail, alongside a lack of support from leaders and managers (which makes up about 33%). Some people don’t want the hassle of introducing a new-fangled system when things are working fine (the operative word being fine). Some have a long-established preference for traditional learning programs (like face-to-face or on-the-job learning) so adopting new learning strategies feels alien and uncomfortable.

In either scenario, the hassle of change outweighs the desire for better results. A big part of this is a lack of emphasis on continuous learning. Maybe personal development is an activity that happens in isolation from other business processes, so it’s not linked to business strategy. It just becomes an afterthought that learners have to do to keep the bosses happy (and we have a word for that kind of learning: Compliance).

So, if learning isn’t a strategic priority, then a new LMS will probably be viewed as extra work for employees to deal with rather than a pathway to career growth. In our experience, this often leads to:

• A lack of time for employees to complete learning outside of their job-related tasks
• Poorly executed program implementation (which further prevents user adoption)
• No incentive to complete training because there is no chance of recognition or advancement
• Siloed learning initiatives that keep teams isolated from each other (rather than furthering business objectives).

It’s not very strategic, and it means you’re wasting a lot of resources, time, and money for little gain. That prevents your organization and workforce from being proactive about business challenges, which isn’t a position you want to be in if your industry is constantly subject to change.

Best practices for successful LMS adoption

It’s easy to fall into the trap of filling your LMS with a lot of content for learners to choose from. But having more content doesn’t necessarily mean learners will find something engaging, or even be motivated to find engaging courses in the first place. The key is to provide contextual learning that helps them grow.

The key to that key is capabilities. They’re the foundation of effective L&D and performance management, bridging the gap between the two to make learning engaging and impactful. Using them to increase adoption requires some strategic thinking.

Strategy #1: Align learning and business objectives

We found 95.5% of companies believe linking employee L&D to career advancement improves employee satisfaction and retention.

With that in mind, you should align your LMS and learning strategy with business goals so:

1. Learning improves how employees perform (and therefore drives business outcomes), and
2. Employees can actually see how their performance contributes to business outcomes, which is more likely to drive employee adoption of learning.

An easy way to create this alignment is to define clear, measurable objectives for the LMS. They’ll provide a focus for the system’s use and help measure its impact on organizational capabilities. These goals should go beyond L&D alone and consider other HR processes like performance management and talent development.

If you have multiple systems for those processes, then common goals create effective communication between those systems. With good communication, you can automate progress tracking, performance measurement, evaluations, and development plans. The right goals get you the right integrations to really align learning and strategic business objectives.

Strategy #2: Secure leadership buy-in

Executives have very specific pain points they want L&D—and by extension, a new LMS—to address. Maybe your sales exec is concerned about the organization’s profitability. In that case, you’ll need to demonstrate how the LMS can develop sales capabilities focused on closing. Show them how an LMS and capability-led strategy is worth the investment of their time, and they’ll be the linchpin for getting buy-in throughout their function.

Don’t forget to get buy-in from leaders throughout your organization structure. Team leaders and frontline managers will have their own pain points and KPIs that need to be met. They’re also often closest to the vast majority of potential influencers or naysayers (i.e., your greater workforce). Giving those leaders learning that improves performance enables them to give those influencers personal reasons to buy into learning. Remember that while learners want training and professional development, it means little if there’s no personal incentive for them.

Strategy #3: Curate relevant learning

We’ll be honest, the best way to do this is to use your learning management system. Its whole job is to manage and deliver learning. If you’re looking for something with more bite, we’d recommend a performance learning management system (PLMS). A PLMS will curate content based on the specific capabilities of a learner’s job role, putting only content that is directly relevant to current capability needs in front of learners. The greater the impact, the higher the uptake.

The magic trick is to keep content updated. Relevance is time-bound and, at a high level, can be impacted by changes in industry (making some skills obsolete), technology, or organizational restructures. For learners, it can be as simple as ensuring content gets more challenging as they progress.

Make sure you’re conducting regular capability gap analyses to identify areas for development. A PLMS again helps here, by mapping content to specific competency levels rather than just capabilities. The system nudges the learner for assessment and creates the development plans. That means that learners are consistently challenged the more they progress, but the only manual work required of you is ensuring any technical content is up-to-date.

Strategy #4: Continuously improve the system and its content

Set-and-forget is never as good as it sounds, because it makes it easy to be complacent. For your LMS to remain effective and impactful, you need to be routinely assessing its efficacy.

This is where L&D metrics come in to play as key indicators of employee engagement. It’s important to gather feedback from users to get an idea of learner satisfaction, but it’s also important that you analyze the tangible data here, too. Yes, LMS adoption increases if learners are engaged and satisfied with learning, but the hard numbers like return on investment (ROI) are a tangible indication of how effective learning has been within the LMS.

Reporting that drills into assessment history, organizational capability, completion status, and course progress gives you a holistic view of where learners may be struggling or disengaging. Review these areas to improve the learning experience—and consider what reporting data might be telling you beyond completions.

Key takeaways

LMS adoption can be hard to attain, especially when there is no shared vision of what learning should look like within your organization.

You can improve employee adoption by linking learning and performance management with capabilities and an LMS (or PLMS) that does the manual heavy lifting for you (think content mapping). Employees want to learn, improve, and grow their careers, and using capabilities to underpin learning and drive performance is crucial to getting them to adopt any learning initiative.

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