Organizations and the learning teams within them continue to embrace technology as the way to bridge learner gaps and create more robust employee experiences. In learning and development (L&D) specifically, technological solutions are found in nearly all stages of the learning process, including design, development, facilitation, evaluation, and many other areas. Tools are often stored together in one all-encompassing technology: the learning management system (LMS).

As these services continue to expand their abilities, they are becoming an important part of the learning ecosystem within organizations; so important, in fact, that one statistic determined that “the LMS market is expected to grow from $28.58 billion in 2025 to $70.83 billion in 2030.” And with the ever-increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), this market is set to shift organizational learning beyond anything the industry has seen before. This presents a unique opportunity for learning practitioners of all backgrounds to adopt a technological-driven learning strategy.

Getting LMS Management Out of a Silo

In many cases, LMS administration falls onto a single designated person within the learning, human resources (HR) or information technology (IT) department. This can create unnecessary strains between learning programs and the system, which ultimately affects the learners most. To prevent an LMS silo from occurring within your organization, it is imperative that every person who supports learning has some information and insight into the system. This could be having awareness about how learners engage with the system, archiving inaccurate or outdated resources or establishing best practices for using the system as a learning function.

Responsibility for an LMS can no longer be designated to just an administrator; it must be a shared and joint effort to ensure learning continuity and consistent experiences remain in effect regardless of who oversees them. In this way, the learning function must have a variety of LMS advocates to support different components of the learning journey.

Who Owns LMS Management? Two Approaches

The next question becomes who your LMS advocates should be. Here are two approaches that work in many organizations.

Role-Based Responsibility

In organizations with a large learning function, responsibility based on role might be the best guide. For example, an instructional designer should probably know how to create courses with uploaded SCORM packages (or publish a course if the LMS is also an authoring tool), a specialist should be able to articulate the system’s functionalities to learners, and learning leaders should be able to report on LMS metrics — all without having to rely on an administrator.

This role-driven method requires boundaries just as much as it requires ownership. For example, an administrator should be solely responsible for adding or removing employees into the system to prevent confusion and oversight. Without neglecting the very real concerns learning professionals could have with this approach, remember that the ultimate goal of sharing this responsibility is to break down silos and empower all learning professionals to know their technologies.

Program-Based Responsibility

For small learning teams, the role-based method might not make sense. Instead, consider adopting a program-owner approach to LMS access. If a person “owns” a specific program, they should have purview into each element of the LMS that is needed to design, develop, facilitate and evaluate the program materials.

This does not mean that they need to be responsible for each step, but rather that they should be able to support as and when needed. In many cases, starting this conversation leads to streamlining the program offering entirely in ways that the program owner would not have otherwise considered, simply because they had better awareness of the LMS.

Final Thoughts

Regardless of the approach taken, having a dynamic mindset around LMS responsibilities and capabilities allows learning professionals in all areas to embrace the tech-forward future of workforce learning. Is there something that you can do today to better engage with or advocate for your LMS so that you’re better equipped to support your organization’s learning needs?