LMS Administration Guide

As the owner of your learning system, your LMS administrator’s job is to ensure that you actually achieve those results.

LMS administrators are responsible for ensuring your organization’s LMS is configured correctly, is kept up-to-date and is easy to manage as possible. They are usually tasked with creating and managing user profiles, designing and organizing training content, tracking employee progress, and troubleshooting technical issues that may arise.

They also play a key role in evaluating training effectiveness by analyzing data on employee performance and training completion rates and identifying areas where training may need improvement or adjustment.

Overall, your LMS administrator can differentiate between a failed LMS that no one uses and a successful LMS at the heart of your knowledge management.

What are the skills and experience required to be an effective LMS administrator?

Sometimes, and especially for smaller companies, an existing employee with administrative or technical skills will be tasked to be your LMS administrator. Often, this new responsibility is an addition to their regular role.

Whereas larger companies, will often have a dedicated LMS administrator, hired or trained specifically for that role.

In any case, there are key skills that will help them be successful, including:

• Strong general administrative skills and proficiency with spreadsheets and other common office software. 
• Basic understanding of instructional design principles in order to effectively create and organize training content within the LMS system.
• Strong communication skills to build relationships with other departments and stakeholders within the organization, and able to communicate both successes and failures.
• Ability to analyze data and metrics related to employee training and performance in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the LMS and make improvements as needed.
• Ability to troubleshoot technical issues or make adjustments to training content in response to feedback or changing organizational needs, so strong problem-solving skills are essential.

In addition, specific experience with the LMS platform being used by the organization is often important.

Many LMS vendors offer training and certification programs for their systems, and having experience and credentials in the specific LMS platform can be helpful for ensuring that the admin is able to manage the system and its features effectively.

The specific duties of an LMS administrator can vary depending on the size of your company, but here is a general list of their technical and administrative duties.

SMB-sized companies

Enterprise-sized companies

Technical issues

Learner feedback

Content organization

Some of the day-to-day challenges LMS admins face as they execute their duties include:

• Technical issues with the LMS system, such as updates, maintenance, and troubleshooting to prevent lost productivity and frustrated users.
• Triaging feedback from learners about course content concerns or questions.
• Ensuring that all content is organized and relevant for the learners. Its easy for things to become messy or disorganized over time if not managed properly.

The success of your company’s training program depends to a large extent on the abilities of your LMS administrators to ensure that the right people are taking the right training and that your system is producing both the results and the reports on how it is helping you achieve your training objectives.

Here are some reasons why companies may face challenges in hiring, training, and retaining LMS administrators.

For SMB-sized companies

Cost of resources or software

Limited time available from a small team

Lack of career advancement opportunities

• SMBs may have limited financial resources, making adding another full-time employee to the team difficult. This leads to LMS administration being one-of-many responsibilities of an already fully-scheduled team.
• SMBs may not be able to afford expensive software licenses for best-in-class course-building software.
• With smaller teams, SMBs may struggle to find the time and resources to train and develop LMS administrators, leaving them to learn on the job or with limited support. This may include training on more advanced course authoring tools.
• With smaller organizations, LMS administrators may have limited opportunities to advance their careers or take on new challenges, which could result in them leaving for larger organizations.
• SMBs may face a limited pool of qualified candidates in their local area, making it difficult to hire skilled LMS administrators. Skilled LMS administrators may ask for a higher salary, again considering your budget.

For Enterprise businesses

Competition from other companies

Complex configuration of systems

Ongoing training for LMS administrators

• With larger budgets and resources, Enterprise businesses may face stiff competition from other organizations looking to hire skilled LMS administrators.
• With larger organizations come more complex LMS systems and larger user bases, making it more challenging to find LMS administrators with the right skills and experience to manage these systems.
• As technology continues to evolve, LMS administrators need to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and tools, which can be a challenge for some organizations.
• Larger organizations may offer more career development opportunities for LMS administrators, but if those opportunities are not made clear or accessible, they may leave for other organizations. Ongoing training on new software technologies and best practices is essential for LMS admins to excel in their roles over time.

How are LMS administrators trained?

There are several options for training LMS administrators, depending on their experience level and the organization's specific LMS platform. Sometimes, change management or crisis management can thrust someone into the role of LMS administrator with little or no training. 

Here are some possible options for LMS administrator training:

• Many LMS vendors offer training and certification programs for their systems. This can include online courses, webinars, and in-person training sessions. These programs often cover topics such as system setup, content creation, user management, and reporting and analytics. This is often covered during their LMS onboarding or Implementation phase.
• LMS administrators can also learn on the job, particularly if they have previous experience in related roles such as instructional design, IT, or system administration. Mentoring from experienced LMS administrators can also be helpful for building skills and knowledge. One pitfall of legacy coaching is that old habits, out-of-date processes, and misinformation can be unwittingly passed on to the new hire if the current LMS team is not fully current with the updated features, functionality, and benefits of their LMS platform.
• Many LMS vendors have a robust help system and produce blog posts and articles to help keep their LMS administrator up to date with changes to the platform. A good LMS administrator will be committed to the concept of continual training upgrades through sources like these.
• There are a variety of self-paced online courses available that can help LMS administrators build skills and knowledge. These courses may cover topics such as LMS administration, instructional design, and eLearning technology and are available through content libraries like Udemy and LinkedIn Learning.
• Several professional associations offer training and resources for LMS administrators. Examples include the eLearning Guild, the Association for Talent Development (ATD), and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).
• Attending conferences and events related to eLearning and LMS administration can provide valuable networking opportunities and access to training sessions and workshops.

There are three compelling reasons that might make you consider hiring someone on a contract term to be your LMS administrator.

1. You don’t have a person already on your team that fits the requirements of the role.
2. You do have a person on your team who is qualified and interested, but they are already at capacity with the work that they have.  Depending on the size of your organization, administering your LMS may be too large to be an extra task for an existing employee to take on or do well. And larger organizations may need more than one LMS administrator to handle the amount of work needed to deliver training across regions, branches, or brands.
3. You need to fill a sudden gap for the short term because of a staffing change, vacation time, parental leave, etc. You may just need someone to get you through a rough patch of change management, expansion, or merger, who can then train your team on best practices so they can step up when the short-term engagement ends. 

Depending on volume, an experienced LMS administrator typically costs you $75–$125 per hour.

The amount of time you need likely will vary throughout the year, so you should look for a contract that provides a block of hours you can use anytime during the year.

At Neovation, we have a dedicated Managed Services team that can step in to help you solve your LMS administration challenges. You can engage us to fit your needs – for a month, a quarter, a year, or as an ongoing partnership that resolves your challenge and ensures your training program is running smoothly. 

Alli

Client Coach, Team Leader

Erin

Senior Administrative Analyst

Alejandra

Administrative Generalist

Silvia

Administrative Generalist

As a fractional member of your team, your Neovation Managed Services Expert will provide you with a skilled set of hands and expert knowledge in your learning system. 

Here are some of the ways we can help you. 

1. As coaches who can guide you through a training initiative, leveraging the system’s strengths while sharing our pro tips.
2. As short or long-term replacement of a missing team member due to illness, parental leave, vacation time, secondment to another department, or termination/resignation.
3. As a supportive team member to help your existing admin team handle an overflow of work due to mergers, acquisitions, rapid growth, or other circumstances. 
4. As training data entry specialists.

Let our team do the heavy lifting with projects like

• Learning plan creation, roll-out, maintenance, and reporting
• Monthly targeted enrollments and reporting
• Entering historical training data 
• Managing external certification or document uploads to ensure compliance 
• Creating and finalizing ILT sessions
• Creating and managing knowledge bases
• Creating online quizzes from existing documented quizzes
• Creating online courses using branded course templates by transferring PPTX files to editable slides
• Consulting on group structure, learning plan layout, and the use of teams within your LMS
• Custom reporting, including manipulating reports outside of your LMS
• Quarterly report on learner usage and engagement
• Revamping your learner dashboards as needed
• And more, depending on what you need

Our managed services team can work with any learning system. We can either provide full LMS administration, or we can augment your existing team.

As expert learning system administrators, we can provide you with exactly the right fit of customized services you need.

We’re here to help.