LMS vs. LXP: Unpacking the Differences and Benefits for Your Organization

In today's ever-changing business and economic landscape, L&D (learning and development) is much more than training an organization's workforce. It's about enabling lifelong learning that improves employee performance while upskilling and retraining employees to adapt to changing needs.

Two revolutionary tools—LMS and LXPs—are reshaping the learning and development landscape. These tools provide employees with engaging, useful development options that help organizations increase productivity, improve retention, and create an overall positive corporate culture. While LMSs have a longer history of delivering, tracking, and reporting on learner activity in courses and training programs, LXPs have risen more recently for their capacity to deliver content and experiences from various sources with suggestions and prompts for actions for the learner.

As the lines between the two categories continue to blur, and as many LMS providers update their platforms to include more LXP-like functionality, it's important to understand the relative merits of these two approaches to learning.

LMS vs LXP

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are the dashboards or operating systems of the technology-enabled classroom. They're designed to centralize, scale, and monitor learning. LMS acts as gatekeepers, evaluators, and large-scale distributors of knowledge-related products and services. They also aim to provide guidance and interaction to employees at every level of the organization.

A Learning Experience Platform (LXP) is designed to elevate the learning experience and adapt to the learning styles of today's mentees. LXPs are people-centric, unlike LMSs, which are designed to be 'management' systems for learning, focusing on business rules, compliance, and course catalog management. LXPs are versatile digital learning platforms that create personalized learning experiences.

Key Features and Benefits of LMS

• Provide robust course creation and management capabilities that allow administrators to organize and structure training materials, set prerequisites, and track learner progress.

• Offer centralized content repositories that allow administrators to store and manage different types of e-learning content, such as documents, videos, presentations, and assessments.

• Allow administrators to enroll learners into courses, track their progress, monitor completion rates, and generate reports to assess the performance of individuals and groups of learners.

• Allow administrators to assess learner understanding and retention with built-in assessment tools for creating quizzes, exams, and assignments.

• Provide features for tracking course completion, managing recertification cycles, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Key Features and Benefits of LXP

• Gather information from social learning networks, blogs, podcasts, videos, articles, and external courses. It allows learners to access an extensive collection of items depending on what they want to learn.

• Use algorithms to analyze learners' preferences, skills, and learning goals. With this information, they deliver personalized content recommendations and adaptive learning paths to meet learners’ specific needs.

• Have elements like forums, chat, and the possibility to share ideas and knowledge with other learners.

• Allow learners to contribute by creating blogs and videos or participating in discussion forums.

• Offer advanced analytics that enables administrators to gain insight into learner engagement, content usage, and overall learning effectiveness.

Catalyzing Systemic Learning to Bridge Skills Gaps in the Workforce

The gap between employees' current skills and the skills they will need to do their jobs is widening. According to one report, 50% of all employees will need to reskill by 2025 to keep up with digital transformation and remain employable. Modern circumstances call for professionals, including managers and leaders, to be adaptable, strong, and creative—and so must mentors and motivators who guide and inspire them.

Leveraging innovative learning solutions such as LMS and LXP together can provide critical insights through learner analytics, enabling the curation and management of personalized learning experiences to address immediate skill gaps while supporting future career growth.