As a training provider, you produce content for your clients—it’s what you do. However, your company might occasionally encounter the following situation:

  • A potential new client prefers to use their own, internal LMS, and their company policies prevent vendors from having access to their learning management systems (LMS). However, as a training provider, you need to maintain full control of your content.

Unfortunately, when this happens, you might have to walk away from the client, which translates into a loss of revenue for your company. But what if this no longer had to be an issue?

The solution to this problem is: external learning management system integration. External LMS integration enables you, as the training provider, to host your courses on your LMS, but your clients can launch that content through their own LMS.

If you’ve never heard of external LMS integration, you are not alone. As a training provider, you design high-quality training materials and send those materials to the client in various ways. When you decide to add an external LMS integration to this business model, it will shift it to content-as-a-service (CaaS), which “focuses on managing structured content into feeds that other applications and properties can consume.”

Let’s discuss the benefits of using external LMS integration to maintain control of training content as a training provider.

Benefits for Training Providers

External LMS integration has great benefits for training providers. These include:

  1. The ability to maintain full control of your intellectual property
  2. The ability to dictate who has access to your content and for how long by setting expiration dates for client access and/or restricting new users from being added.
    • This can be especially helpful if your content is either subscription based or contains proprietary information.
  3. The ability to send course updates immediately to clients
  4. Increased revenue due to being able to take on clients that need to use their own LMS for training initiatives

Benefits for Clients

  1. They get access to new courses without the stress and time commitment of creating their own content.
  2. Learners can launch these new courses from their own LMS, so they don’t have to re-learn another system.
  3. They can keep external vendors out of their LMS. ​​Once they have the course content, they can manage everything themselves, without having external or non-employee users in their system.
  4. Clients always get the version of the course that you want them to get (i.e., something up to date or a specific version).

Another benefit of external LMS integration is its reporting capabilities. Since the course is integrated with the client’s LMS, the client can use the reports within their LMS to monitor statistics, such as course completions. They can run reports on a regular basis and provide those reports to upper management.

As the training provider, you can also run reports on data such as course status, scores, and duration that are being sent from the client’s LMS to yours. This helps you track the success of your training and provide helpful insights to your clients. Being proactive with your clients is an excellent way to maintain a strong relationship.

For example, training completion rates are great signs of how well a course is designed. If users are unable to complete the course in the allotted time, it’s a sign that something may be wrong with the training content. Perhaps learners are getting stuck on a slide, the course is too difficult, or it’s malfunctioning in other ways.

Conclusion

External LMS integration is something that benefits training providers and clients alike. It enables training providers like yourself to maintain full control of your training content and gives your clients the flexibility to launch content from their own LMS. Most importantly, it’s another tool in your belt as you try to grow a successful online training business.

Here at Firmwater, we don’t just sell an LMS for training providers. We partner with our clients, giving them the tools and insights they need to implement the best practices in e-learning course development, growth, and delivery. We care too much about our customers’ businesses to have them wade through forums and chatbots for help.

Ready to use an LMS that’s designed for the way YOU work, with a team dedicated to YOUR needs? Book a no-obligation consultation directly with our team today!