Absorb LMS vs. Vector LMS and Industrial Manufacturing Training

Absorb LMS is appropriate for any continuing education organization or company that wants a reliable platform to host enduring educational content. It has been a great experience in terms of building and designing courses, monitoring learner progress, and as another touch point for learners to access other resources our organization offers.

Incentivized

A good scenario for this program is when you need to roll out more customized and specific content that is targeted to a specific department or group. Each leader or department can create their own content that makes it easy for their own employees to complete and finish it at their own pace and on their own hours. It is not that great for leaders or administrators that want to create and upload custom content, this process is not easy and takes more time than it should.

Incentivized

• Usability - Both the User and Admin Experience is so simple and intuitive. The admin tools are clearly defined and laid out, yet the functionality makes it still powerful.
• Integration - We used the Scheduled Data Imports and Exports to connect with our HRIS tool. After the initial configuration, it has worked reliably and gives me all the custom data I need to make assignments and reporting a breeze.
• Design - I know it's covered a little bit in the Usability above, but the site just looks fantastic. There are a lot of options to customize and fit your branding requirements and all of the thumbnails/posters/billboards/etc give a very visual and appealing look to the LMS. Much better than I've seen in other products.

Incentivized

• The user interface and command are fairly self-guiding and self-explanatory. It's not that difficult to know or figure out where to go next or what to click next.
• The lesson progression and tracker are clear as well. You know easily where you are in a module, how much is left, etc. It also is easy for managers and those on the backend to track progress and see completion.
• It reaches all employees virtually which is crucial since we are fully remote now and have employees in all time zones across the country.

Incentivized

• Uploading documents is perceived as hard for employees, especially with video uploads.
• Sometimes the program lacks and then an employee has to start all over.
• Spacing courses is possible but not with a certain amount of time, which would be useful if the next course could open after a week/month instead of when the employee finishes the previous course.

Incentivized

• Customizing the [Vector] LMS content can be difficult sometimes on the backend, it is not intuitive and our [Vector] LMS administrators have to get involved every time - even for simple customizations.
• Improving the experience on the backend when loading or curating content needs improvement. Once it's uploaded it's fine, but getting to that point is cumbersome.
• Platform stability is questionable at times in terms of timing out, glitches, having to restart modules, etc. This should be looked into and made more stable.

Incentivized

We have no plans to move away from Absorb at this time. It has all of the functionality we are looking for in a learning management system and we have a lot of info stored in our LMS system for trainings including all of our current and past employee transcripts. It is also getting easier to manager with being able to connect the LMS to ADP to update employee reporting/department/location/etc. We don't have a need or reason to move away from Absorb at this time.

Incentivized

It's a great place to house our trainings and keep things interesting for our associates.

I know the support team is hard at work! We are currently dealing with a confusing issue where our buttons don't connect to the pages we assign them, and they have been looking into this for a number of weeks. I hope they will unravel the issue soon so we can role out our modules!

Incentivized

I meet and do training with my absorb support every week. and I have all my questions answered! it's great

Our organization previously used LMS365, which did not support eCommerce and had difficulties supporting external users. (My understanding is the issues with external users may have been directly related to our Microsoft implementation and not directly LMS365's fault, but it was nonetheless a deal breaker for us.) Docebo was the runner up in our LMS selection process and I spent significant time chatting with the team at Docebo. It seemed like a strong competitor to Aborb. Ultimately, Absorb was both slightly more cost-efficient for our scenario.

Incentivized

I was not involved in the selection process for [Vector] LMS; however, from my experiences with other platforms, this one seems to be solid. It's not perfect as no platform is, but it seems to get the job done especially for those on the user end. As mentioned, if you want to upload custom content it can be a task that requires more time and effort than it should.

Incentivized

• Course enrollments and completions have increased by 500% since implementation
• Employee visits to our learning centre have increased by 300% since implementation
• Cost saving from a time perspective as we can automate a lot of the admin work we used to do.
• Pre Absorb we had about 3 or 4 e-learnings that were available. We now have over 100 that are accessible to all employees
• Ability to seamlessly integrate with Workday and Udemy allowing all learning to be in one place, people data to be imported from WD, and very comprehensive reporting

Incentivized

• I cannot speak to the cost of the platform as I wasn't involved in the process, but it seems to be a good investment. Most features are logical and easy to use unless you're on the backend.
• The negative impact is most felt by leaders that want custom content to be created or uploaded. This is not a quick turnaround and can cause delays or issues.
• The positive impact is it allows people to complete it at their own pace and can be reached by all employees. Especially in the virtual environment, it is really useful.

Incentivized