Skilljar’s Customer Education LMS Platform is a solution to educate, engage, and retain everyone a business interacts with. Skilljar is an external LMS that is purpose-built for customer and partner education. It enables the user to build courses, design learning paths, monetize training, and improve the customer experience through actionable analytics. Turn new buyers into successful users: Skilljar’s external LMS helps onboard customers and partners and turn them…
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Vector LMS
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Vector LMS (replacing the former Convergence LMS) is a learning management system designed specifically for the needs of industrial & manufacturing facilities. It is designed to identify skill and compliance gaps, deliver consistent training, and build a stronger workforce, and is delivered from Convergence Training, a Vector Solutions company (acquired 2018).
Skilljar works extremely well for customer and partner training, specifically self-led training like micro-learning, elearning, and learning paths. Skilljar is a good choice for internal training if your needs are more around product training. From an administrator perspective, it's very easy and intuitive to upload content, create pages, pull reports, and overall maintenance making is possible for small teams (even a team of one) to manage. The Skilljar APIs make it simple to integrate into other systems like your CRM, advocacy platform, webinar platforms, etc.
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.
The design is simple. If you're looking for a complex or beautiful platform, this isn't it. However, Skilljar makes things very easy to follow and build within.
Navigating Skilljar is very logical. it is easy to set up a new course and navigate within that course.
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.
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.
The interface is clean and easy to use. It provides straightforward WYSIWYG editing and quick publishing tools. Analytics are fairly easy to navigate, as well. HTML code can be edited directly, but it can be a bit difficult as it appears as plain text with no color-coding or error checking. In spite of this, the code snippets feature is very useful in providing customizations.
The support team is great at Skilljar. Not perfect, but that can't be expected. Everyone I've worked with has been friendly, attentive, and fairly quick to respond/act. They also have a pretty sturdy set of Knowledge Base articles as well to self serve.
There is absolutely an ecosystem of products and solutions required to support and enable end users - one can think of them as an orchestra. Each part does a specific job or task and each has a varying degree of ease of use and compatibility. Skilljar is the container that holds all learning content that is developed through authoring tools such as rise and storyline. However this ecosystem is incomplete without a smooth way to collect user feedback or to have a proactive strategy of user engagement. Much of the lift is handled by a team of education professionals who understand this orchestra metaphor
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.
Our customers seem to be getting onboarded efficiently. Giving our customers a good experience helps us retain them longer.
So far, we are still not able to come up with solid metrics that it provides evidence of ROI. If Skilljar could somehow come up with clear, actionable metrics about customer success and how that relates to ROI then I think it would be vastly better. To be fair, we roll the cost of using Skilljar in the overall price, otherwise, we would charge customers and have a revenue stream to measure.
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.