A performance learning management system (PLMS) allows organizations to address the topics of performance and learning in one platform. With a PLMS, leaders can continually assess and improve learners based on their specific company and role-based capabilities.

More specifically, a PLMS is used by organizations in six core ways:

• Before learning: A PLMS can be used to discover, define, assess, and map organizational and role-based capabilities of your learners before delivering training.
• To manage learning: A PLMS can facilitate and manage all learning opportunities in a learner profile as the central system of record. This includes not just eLearning, but extends to coaching, mentoring and in-person courses, and captures key interactions hidden within organizations, transforming them into shareable learning assets that promote knowledge exchange at scale.
• To assess learning: A PLMS goes beyond traditional learning management system (LMS) reporting (e.g., completions). It identifies and measures role-based capabilities to ensure alignment with organizational performance.
• Embedded performance management: At its core, this is how you link learning and performance. Learning completion is only one aspect of performance. Demonstrating the learning in real-world scenarios is how to close the loop on whether the learnings were applied. Leaders can assess proficiencies for each capability that a person is responsible for. The PLMS allows for a data-driven discussion that has a historical progression of the learner’s evolution. These informed discussions enhance employee engagement and performance management whilst linking the chasm of people and company performance.
• Multi-stakeholder learning: Every organization has the need to share knowledge externally (e.g., with customers, partners or members) and internally with employees. A PLMS should allow for specific learning portals to tailor the content and experience to the different groups. It’s costly to create and maintain multiple learning portals. By having one account with multiple users, the organization can decrease course management efforts, increase learner adoption and view usage in one common analytics layer. When each learner uses one platform, the linking of progress to performance becomes possible.
• Workflow automation: Managing the measurement of learning and performance is hard. Leaders are forced into entering data into hundreds of spreadsheets and learners must try and see their learning history via these spreadsheets. A PLMS helps to automate the recommendation of learning, the assignment of role-specific capabilities, and the regular administration tasks of onboarding and maintaining a dynamic learning and performance-focused assessment process. Once a new learner enters the organization the PLMS should kick off initial and scheduled assessments so that leaders don’t need to remember to.

Key Points of Difference

Let’s explore the key points of difference between a PLMS and an LMS in each of the above areas in further detail.

• Before learning: The key point of difference is the PLMS’s focus on capabilities. A capability is defined as a combination of personal and technical skills, knowledge, processes, tools and behaviors that are critical to an organization’s success and future needs. Skills form an important part of this. Skills-based organizations might still use a PLMS, but there is an acceptance that skills can be completed and the application of those skills needs to be demonstrated. The PLMS should allow leaders to define and measure both the capabilities and the proficiencies of their team members.
• Manage learning: The key point of difference as part of managing learning is that traditional LMSs are focused on management and completion of eLearning, while a PLMS captures does this and the evaluation of the learnings.
• Assess learning: A PLMS allows organizations to get a baseline assessment of their capability based on both organization needs and the needs of defined roles. This allows you to link capability directly to learning assessments.
• Embedded performance management: The key point of difference is that when you have independent learning technology, you often get data redundancy, inaccurate reporting and analytics, and difficulty in having objective performance reviews. PLMSs can solve these issues by embedding performance conversations with learning conversations.
• Multi-stakeholder learning: The key point of difference is that high-performing organizations excel with all internal and external stakeholders. LMSs might deliver learning to some internal and external stakeholders, but PLMSs serve all driving organizational stakeholders enabling efficiency gains, streamlined operations, simplification and, ultimately, high performance.
• Workflow automation: The key point of difference is that high-performing organizations focus on the task at hand. To be high performing, you should not have your enabling technologies across manual spreadsheets and forms or disparate, poorly integrated software.

Frequently Asked Questions About PLMSs

Question: I have just started exploring capability building or am not yet ready. Is a PLMS right for me?

Answer: Yes, many users of a PLMS use the core LMS as a starting point. This gives them all the benefits of legacy LMSs, plus the inclusion of capturing all formats of learning and then the ability to scale up as learning maturity moves up toward capability building.

Question: We’re heavily invested in and focused on building skills. Is a PLMS right for me?

Answer: The recent explosion of the skills-based organization and all the benefits this brings form a core part of a PLMS. PLMSs lead with capabilities and show how learning impacts organizational performance. (It is widely accepted that skills play an important part in driving performance, but cannot do so in isolation, hence the focus on capabilities.)

A PLMS allows you to take the definitions for your capabilities and proficiency definitions into the platform easily so that you don’t have to confirm it to the PLMS provider. You will also be able to access a PLMS provider’s own capability library (and industry standards like SFIA) to help you get out of the gate quickly.

Question: I’ve been in learning and development (L&D) for a long time. How is this not just another marketing play on words?

Answer: It’s a fair question, but the key is how a PLMS is built. The research and development that goes into a provider of a PLMS must meet the six components of a PLMS, including: before learning, manage learning, assess learning, embedded performance management, multi-stakeholder learning and workflow automation.

Question: Where does a PLMS sit within my existing learning tech stack?

Answer: PLMS is a sub-category of the legacy LMS category. And as such, it sits alongside legacy LMSs if you have multiple systems. In some cases, within certain organizations, it is the only learning management technology. It integrates with traditional HRMs, HRISs and payroll systems among other relevant systems.

Question: With the exponential growth and improvements in artificial intelligence (AI), how is this incorporated?

Answer: The PLMS’s take is different to the legacy LMS take on AI. The use cases for AI in LMSs are focused on creating more — more learning briefs, more learning content and more AI admin assistance. PLMSs come from a different angle, with their innovative generative AI systems focusing on assisting organizations in identifying optimal workforce capabilities. The PLMS focuses more on recommendations to the organization’s strategy, problems, priorities and key performance indicators (KPIs). AI prompts users with targeted discovery questions, aligning with overall business or departmental strategies.

The PLMS is a powerful way to merge learning and performance in a single platform. Use these recommendations and tips to consider whether it’s right for your programs