How an LMS Helps Business Services Firms Navigate These Five Major Shifts

The business services industry is in the middle of a seismic shift. In many ways, professional services is a highly traditional industry, used to working manually. It’s also an older industry, due for a wave of retirements in the next five years. The business services industry is also more reliant on legacy IT than other industries, and is beginning its digital revolution.

That’s a lot of change to hit an industry all at once. And with transition comes learning — a lot of it. Employees need to be upskilled, and a flood of new hires will need onboarding. How are business services companies, many of which rely on older IT, organizing their training? And how will they organize it in the next five years?

Do Business Services Firms Need an LMS?

As the business services industry moves through major changes, it will see an increased need for learning and development (L&D). These are the five biggest changes that business services firms are expecting in the next five years:

1. As a large percentage of its workforce retires, business services firms will need to onboard replacements.
2. Remote workforces will require more online courses, rather than in-person instruction.
3. More open management roles will mean more need for leadership training.
4. New technological tools, like AI, will call for upskilling across the workforce.
5. Changes in regulations will mean new compliance training. 

For professional services firms, many of which offer multiple service lines, organizing all of that learning can be daunting. While in the past, business services firms may have offered in-person training or used spreadsheets to organize online training content, a manual approach is unlikely to work well for a large volume of training content. It just doesn’t scale well. 

How Can an LMS Help Professional Services Firms? 

A learning management systems (LMS) is a tool that helps firms quickly create and deploy learning. An effective business services LMS should also provide a window into employee performance, tracking their completion of learning modules as well as their mastery of skills. Through an LMS, a manager can assign courses and learning pathways to individual learners, managing their learning progress.

Below are some ways an LMS can help business services companies: 

1. Streamline onboarding
   The retirement of many in the professional services field means that many organizations are going to be hiring. An LMS makes it easy to create a standardized onboarding program for all new hires, and to track those hires’ learning progress. By standardizing onboarding, businesses can ensure that all new hires get the same training, and become productive more quickly. 

2. Support upskilling and reskilling
   As professional services firms move from legacy IT to subscription-based software and AI-based solutions, training will become important. An LMS can quickly teach the workforce how to use new tools and technologies.  

3. Enable leadership development
   Movement within the business services workforce is likely to create openings in management roles as leaders retire. Using an LMS, training managers can build structured pathways for employees who are interested in moving into management. 

4. Simplify compliance training
   Compliance is a big part of the professional services industry. In order to do their jobs well, employees need to stay on top of new and changing regulations. Many platforms (like Litmos) come with libraries of pre-made courses, which are updated as soon as regulations change. This takes the burden of updating regulatory content off the shoulders of the training manager.

5. Support remote and hybrid teams
   In the past, when everyone worked out of an office, it was easy to follow up with learners after an in-person training. Now, however, with so many employees working in remote or hybrid roles, an LMS is an important way to make sure everyone is included in training, no matter where that worker is based. An LMS also allows training managers to follow up with every employee and track their progress. 

How One Business Services Firm Uses an LMS to Train their Global Team 

Canidium is a software consultancy with more than 150 active learners across North America, India, UK, Latin America, and Australia. 

As an implementation partner for a range of software solutions, Canidium’s employees need to be up on leading edge technology and tools. For example, as an SAP implementation partner, the team needs to be on top of the latest SAP product releases. Often this means the team needs to learn a new release fast, so they can support customer implementations.

With just two learning specialists on staff, Canidium needed a learning solution that would simplify the process of delivering training to their learners. By partnering with Litmos, Canidium was able to build a dynamic, agile learning strategy, easily rolling content out to learners across the globe. 

Canidium needed a learning solution that would simplify the process of delivering training to their learners. Litmos lets them easily create and deploy courses to learners worldwide. 

An LMS is an essential tool for the business services industry

The business services industry is entering a period of rapid transformation, with retiring talent, evolving technologies, new compliance demands, and increasingly distributed workforces all converging at once. Firms that still rely on manual or outdated approaches to training will struggle to keep pace. An LMS provides the structure, scale, and agility needed to not only meet today’s challenges but also prepare for the future.

The right learning platform empowers professional services firms to keep their people current, onboard talent quickly, and adapt to shifting client and market needs. In a world where knowledge and skills are a firm’s greatest asset, an LMS isn’t just a tool for training. It’s a foundation for resilience, growth, and long-term success.

Scalable, high-impact learning and development programming can help your business services firm adapt to the changes ahead. Discover how Litmos can help revolutionize the way that you onboard, upskill, and keep your teams compliant. Request a free demo today.