The Difference Between an LMS and an LXP

Choosing which technological tools to use at your company can feel daunting. With an abundance of products on the market and a range of challenges confronting companies as they manage remote and hybrid work styles. It’s critical to build a tech stack that supports your company’s needs no matter the industry, the size of your team, or where your team members work.

When it comes to training, the right tools can make or break your employees’ learning experience. With teams spread across locations (sometimes even countries), training must be accessible from any sort of device at any time.

Many companies have held onto outdated learning strategies and have struggled to keep up with training needs during the ongoing pandemic. As companies move forward, they must embrace technology and outfit their tech stack with the tools they need to keep their team members engaged.

In the learning and development world, many leaders are talking about the differences between an LMS and an LXP and how they contribute to training success. If you’re one of the many on the fence about an LMS and an LXP, we want to help you distinguish between the two and determine which one is better for your company.

What is an LMS?

When thinking about an LMS and an LXP, it’s best to think of them as siblings. LMS is the older sibling who is more established in the learning and development field, and LXP is the younger sibling setting out in the industry. They both have unique features, but they have shared genes (if you will) at the same time.

LMS, a learning management system, serves businesses large and small with training and development tools that allow the company to offer specific courses, create learning objectives, and support overall training initiatives. With LMS features, learning managers can assign and track courses, measure employee compliance, and get both a close-up and bird’s-eye view of the company’s overall training performance.

An LMS software is the right choice for your company if you’re looking for something to help measure compliance, support company-wide training initiatives, and provide a bit of personalization for the learner without putting any organizational pressure on them, meaning they don’t have to figure out which courses to take. An LMS platform is especially beneficial to companies that have learning and development teams or even managers (across departments) who need to create and assign training to keep their teams on track.

If you’re looking for a training platform that makes it easy to curate, create, and disperse engaging learning content for your team members, choose an LMS. Training managers will be well served by a learning management system that offers the ability to create new courses, assign learning requirements, and offer a clear, robust set of LMS data analytics about learners’ performance.

An LMS can serve large and small companies alike. With the ExpertusONE LMS platform, large companies have seen great success when dispersing training initiatives to their thousands of employees. The platform offers flexibility for learners and functionality for training managers. Insightful data is recorded and shared with training managers, so they can track and report on employee training performance. Even further, with the incorporation of artificial intelligence, the ExpertusONE learning management system customizes course recommendations for each learner—making the experience more personalized and relieving the pressure on learning managers to do this manually.

What is an LXP?

LXP, a learning experience platform, serves the learner. You may also think of skills development platforms when you’re thinking of an LXP, as they fall under the same umbrella. While both LXPs and skills development platforms are educational tools just like LMS platforms, they are geared more toward the learner, and the training strategy is learner-driven, meaning that users pick and choose from available courses more than they are assigned courses.

Choose an LXP if your learners need more autonomy and flexibility and if you’re not looking to push a number of courses or a lot of content their way. An LXP or a skills development platform is the right tool for companies looking to use training as a way to engage their employees, but not necessarily monitor training success or focus on overall compliance goals.

An LXP offers learners the freedom to find and even share courses that they find interesting or valuable. They can collect learning materials from other resources and add them to the LXP, creating learning strategies of their own.

Instead of a set of courses curated by a company’s learning and development department, an LXP lets learners curate their own course library and choose what they will focus on. This can be a valuable asset if companies are looking to offer upskilling resources and support their team members’ unique career goals by making more space for personalized learning.

Can you have both an LMS and an LXP in one?

Yes, you can absolutely combine the benefits of an LMS with the allure of an LXP. For many companies, crafting an engaging learning and development experience will require both the administrative side that an LMS platform offers and the learner-driven experience that an LXP offers. We have kept this in mind at ExpertusONE and created an all-encompassing enterprise LMS platform that combines the best of both worlds.

For example, the ExpertusONE LMS offers those essential components of learning and development that training managers rely on: insightful metrics, data-driven insights, and views of the company’s overall training performance. The system operates like both an LMS and an LXP. Training managers can easily assess learner progress, follow up with team members who are lagging behind, and adjust course offerings as needed. These insights are essential to a successful corporate training strategy, and they can help managers demonstrate the efficacy of their training plans (or adjust when training falls flat). With innovative and engaging tools like an integrated content player, video conferencing, integration with apps like Slack, Salesforce, and Microsoft teams, and elements like gamification and AI, the platform offers learners an interactive training experience, just like an LXP. Even further, the learning experience can be personalized based on a learner’s interests (thanks to AI), and learners can choose from a wide selection of courses made available by their companies.

Choosing an LMS platform for your company doesn’t mean that you have to forsake the needs of learners in favor of your L&D managers. Instead, look for a learning management system that supports the needs of your whole team, from managers to new hires. With engaging elements and a functional design, the ExpertusONE LMS platform serves training managers and learners alike.

When choosing between an LMS and an LXP, it’s essential to understand your users’ needs and your company’s needs. Will users be able to enjoy interactive courses with personalized suggestions? Will managers be able to measure compliance and follow up with team members who are lagging behind? These factors, and others mentioned throughout this article, are key to a successful learning experience.

If you want the best of both worlds, look for a learning management system that focuses as much on the learner experience as it focuses on the manager experience. Find an LMS is also an LXP. The ExpertusONE platform offers personalization, insightful data reports, and flexibility so that learners and managers can interact with training materials whether at home, in the office, online or offline.

Interested in our interactive LMS platform? Contact us for a demo today.