Absorb LMS aims to empower organizations to train employees with the skills needed to stay modern and relevant in today's fast-paced world. The LMS software focuses on aligning learning needs with business demands.
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PiiQ by Cornerstone (discontinued)
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Cornerstone’s PiiQ was an SMB offering that included core learning management and performance management systems, based on Sonar6 which was acquired by Cornerstone in 2012, and ultimately discontinued in 2022.
As a way to deliver eLearning content and track completion, I think Absorb handles our 7000+ users competently. In addition, their support team was always extremely helpful and responsive. When we went through the process of integrating Absorb with Skillsoft Business Advanced library, Absorb's team was very knowledgeable and helpful. I think teams needing more streamlined checklist-style OJT skills tracking will be disappointed by Absorb's feature. It takes 4-5 clicks for a user to trainer to sign off on one skill.
Overall, Absorb LMS is pretty easy to use for learners and especially for admins. It's practical to create and manage course content - it provides the most crucial options and yet is lean enough not to overcomplicate the admin's life. The consistent and customizable "table-view" in most of the admin-areas is very helpful and easy to follow.
Using Enrollment Rules, Absorb LMS let you define who a course applies to and how they get enrolled. You can build rules based on learner attributes, such as department, location job role, group, to include or exclude specific audiences. The way Absorb LMS is using enrollment attributes, no other LMS actually can fulfill our requirements easier. Enrollment rules are mainly embedded in individual course options (you can also create scheduled enrollments outside of the courses).
Enables employees to draft work goals and collaborate with their supervisors on a final version - improves mutual understanding right up front.
Combines performance goal ratings with competency ratings and provides a blended score. Simplifies the goal weighting so you don't have to do any calculations.
9-box matrix provides useful definitions and descriptions so managers can prepare development notes or plans for individual employees.
The "And" and "Or" rules for self + automatic enrollment could be spelled out more to clarify who we're enrolling into courses
The thumbnail and poster "Upload photo" section is confusing. There should be a "Favorites" folder where we can easily find most commonly used posters and thumbnails
more education around Absorb analyze essentials
How the Featured courses section ranks courses is confusing on the back-end. I need to switch the primary one to second place to feature the new one first. But if the previous one now becomes second place, what happens to the old course that was in second place? I've noticed the order you select on the back-end for this isn't always reflected on user side
Same comment as Featured Courses but for appearance of billboards. Hard to position each in the right order
Would be good to have have a virtual "top level" (eg board) user built in to allow senior execs without a direct manager to be able to be set up with KPIs instead of having to create a dummy user
Reports have difficulty downloading if pop ups disabled or in some browser environments
When competencies are updated while a cycle is open, any changes don't effect that open cycle but only future ones. Would be nice to be able to have the option to apply changes to existing "open" cycles
We love the ability to have a user-friendly system that integrates well with our different HR interfaces (we have 3 systems that feed data/employees into the system). It makes it easy to track course completions and report out on metrics enterprise-wide. In addition, the ability to provide consistent education to staff who are geographically dispersed is a huge incentive for us, and Absorb LMS does this seamlessly.
It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.
I have never built/managed an LMS platform before and I find it very user friendly and capable of doing 98% of what I need it to do. We have been in the system almost a year and one of the struggles I had using the reporting tool has already been resolved and updated!
There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.
We have never had any major issue with Absorb's availability. Any outages that have occurred have been planned an communicated. Any small issues that occur within the Absorb platform have been addressed efficiently and quickly by support and the development team
We have experienced infrequent issues with things like load times on reporting, or pages timing out, but for the large majority of our time within the system things have worked as they should
The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.
We absolutely loved both our sales representative, Mike Kuphos, and our Implementation manager, Joe Zizian. Joe has continued to be a great resource, even since we went live with our LMS and were moved into the maintenance stage! I sent over a quick question recently when I was stuck in the platform... within hours, he responded with a video walking me through how to do what I was having trouble with. I truly cannot say enough wonderful things about Joe and the level of customer service he has provided throughout implementation and beyond. I haven't really had to use alternate support methods.
My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.
The training was comprehensive - there were existing modules to learn functionality but working with Absorb staff, and receiving recordings of those walk-throughs, made a rapid understanding of the LMS achievable and covered the necessary material that was needed and allowed for specific questions to be addressed.
The implementation of Absorb went very seamlessly. We previously had the Oracle LMS and importing user data and getting the new system up to speed was painless. The smooth transition helped leaders and staff gain confidence early in the application/company and we have had a successful partnership with Absorb since.
I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.
I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads
Absorb LMS is feature packed with small but smart elements (can have a username that isnt an email, can change the core language used in the platform, can change the font and layout) that offer greater security and accessibility for learners.
Lesson.ly has been great to work with but it is a very clear and simple, user-friendly system that anyone can pick up with very little training as it is self-explanatory. It also has a great mobile interface and lots of different features that are easy to add for the admin but really impactful for the user.
We have already scaled our LMS from a couple hundred users to 1000 users and have plans to scale even larger. We use the LMS across multiple internal departments. countries and user types. Absorb has made it easy to integrate and scale and we will continue to scale in the near future.
We work directly with Kirsten Spak, who has continuously provided timely and quality help for myself as the lead and our organization. Kirsten has helped us ensure that we are going about things as efficiently and is always willing to walk through things to demonstrate suggestions and functions. As we look to expand our offerings further, Kirsten has helped strategize for the best approach, which has helped our workflow and the end-user experience. As we are still relatively new users, but using the LMS every day, Kirsten has been very patient and provided clear instruction on processes when we were unsure of what to do and has been able to troubleshoot, with her team, functions that were desired but not availability at the time, to provide us with solutions.
Our ROI is yet to be determined as we haven't fully rolled it out yet. We hope that this will improve our customer loyalty and advocacy, set us apart from competitors, and appeal to prospects as something that is extremely valuable. ROI measurements will include customer participation, satisfaction from learners and their managers and any new customers who quote the platform as a reason they chose us.
It's tool and it's only as good as the person wielding it. The investment in PiiQ was accompanied by a quarterly cadence and manager feedback training. We feel like our employees are given regular feedback and bonuses are tied to objective accomplishment.
