When you’re a business, a great training program is key. Whether it be training new staff, training customers, or even selling some courses – your training can make or break your success.
There’s plenty of learning management systems (LMS) on offer. TalentLMS is a popular option with many, but is it worth the hype? In this TalentLMS review, we’ll find out.
Note: I know that this is an unbiased review but I absolutely love TalentLMS… So I’ll try not to have that impact my writing too much!
Don’t Want to Wait? Here’s Our TalentLMS Review Summary
What is TalentLMS?
TalentLMS is a cloud-based learning management system ( LMS) that lets you create and deliver training, courses, and other learning content to employees, customers, and partners.
TalentLMS is ideal for small to mid-sized businesses and perfect for almost any niche.
So, it doesn’t matter if you’re into tech, healthcare, education HR, retail, or any other professional services. It’s a great tool for:
- Employee onboarding
- Compliance training
- Skill training
- Sales training
- New product training
- All the other training modules you need for your stakeholders.
But, the tool isn’t just for internal training. With the same account, you can also train customers and external groups too.
TalentLMS Course Creation Process
TalentLMS is surprisingly intuitive and straightforward during the course creation process. I often find that some LMS sites can be a bit cumbersome – especially at the start.
However, as soon as you enter your details, you get an option to create a course straight away. Honestly, it was super-easy.
From there, it’s all pretty straight forward. You’re given the option to name your course and give it a description. You can change these whenever you like, but it’s good to put something there at the start, so you can navigate your admin dashboard (more on that later).
After the first time, you can create a new course from the admin dashboard. Once you’ve created your course, you can add content. Again, adding content is very straightforward.
You can drag and drop your content or upload them; either from your computer or via URL. Once you’ve added your content, you can decide on what’s required by the students.
- You can give them a set time limit.
- A ‘click complete’ button which is great for videos and required readings.
- Answering questions.
You’ll also need to set the rules and paths too. That means that you can decide:
- What order content is delivered
- What units need to be completed to pass a unit
- The learning path
- How to calculate average (by tests only, or tests and course work)
All in all, creating a training course on TalentLMS is perfect, and gives you way more options than an LMS designed for online courses.
Is TalentLMS Easy to Use
Using TalentLMS is a lot easier than I thought it would be when I started using it. As I mentioned before, an open-ended LMS can be a bit of a nightmare. However, I found TalentLMS to be a bit of a breeze.
Don’t get me wrong. If you’ve never used something like an LMS before, you might get a little overwhelmed at the start.
But, there’s an option to take a sample course as a student. When you’re in that course, you’ll get a great rundown on how to navigate the system.
There’s also a great admin dashboard that has access to everything.
One thing that can be a little hard to work is the access levels. There are three levels of access:
- Admin
- Instructor
- Learner
Each one of those access levels has different capabilities. So you need to make sure you click the button at the top of the page and make sure you’re in the right profile when you try and do something.
However, this is literally the first thing the introduction course goes through with TalentLMS, so you’re made aware very early.
TalentLMS Has a Bunch of Great Features
There are a lot of great features that TalentLMS has to offer. Some of the best are:
- White-labeling: Add your own logos and colors to the platform to make it yours.
- Homepage builder: You can create a modern public website that sits on top of your courses. You can even hide pages that are specifically created for logged in users.
- Course Store: There’s a TalentLibrary, which lets you purchase pre-created courses. This can be added to your monthly fee too. This is a great way to add bonus content to your staff.
- Reporting: There’s excellent reporting. Basically, everything you need to keep track of, you can.
- Branching: I really like the way to segment your courses into ‘branches’. Each branch is its own little world with its own theme, courses, and even different users.
- Sell your courses: You can sell your courses via popular payment options like PayPal or Stripe. Offer global discounts or coupons. Sell individual courses or offer them via a subscription payment.
The feature of selling your courses means that you could create some really in-depth and awesome courses if you’re an online course creator. This is a cool little bonus – however, it’s definitely more of a tool for training and onboarding.
What Educational Benefits Are on Offer?
Like any LMS, you need to have educational benefits. Otherwise, all of the fancy course-creation tools and great features are useless.
TalentLMS offers a great blended learning experience. You can mix eLearning with instructor-led training.
You can even deliver instructor-led training events in a classroom or through secure videoconferencing.
Along with that blended learning ability, you can use gamification strategies to make your courses engaging and promote a culture of learning.
You can do the following gamification techniques:
- Badges
- Points
- Levels
- Leaderboards
- Rewards
You can completely customize your gamification experiences through a dedicated engine.
There’s also a great way to manage certifications. You can design your own certificates. This is great for yearly training and making sure your staff achieves those vital levels in their learning.
What Support Does TalentLMS Offer?
I’ve used TalentLMS for a while now, and I believe that their support is more than enough to get you out of any sticky situation.
It starts from when you first create an account. When you create an account you set some goals and industries that will automatically tailer your experience to suit you.
Once you’re in the system though, there are plenty of options for support.
- Quick guide
- Knowledge Base
- Tour
- Videos
- Contact Support
These are all in great depth and give users all the know-how to fix any little issues along the way.
In regards to live support, that is only on offer for Premium plans or above. However, you can certainly get by without the live chat while you’re just starting out.
There is also an initial introduction course that I briefly mentioned earlier. This course is a great way to get your bearings with the platform and decide find your way around the platform.
Price: How Much Does TalentLMS Cost?
I’ve put the price at the bottom of this review, so you don’t let it overpower the rest of your buying decisions.
The prices for TalentLMS range from completely free, to nearly $700 a month. So there’s a price point for everyone.
As is standard for almost any LMS, there are a bunch of different payment levels. Obviously, each level has different accesses and features on offer. So, what you decide on will dictate your price.
I’m not going to go through every pricing option and explain what you do/don’t get because… well, that’d be boring for both of us. However, there’s a few thing’s that’ll impact the price for you.
For starters, there are standard and active plans.
- A standard plan is a blanket number of users (ie. 40 total users)
- An active plan is how many active members use the platform a month (ie. 40 users a month). An active plan means that you have, say, 400 staff but only 20 a month do a particular training, then you’ll only need to pay for 20 active users, instead of 400 total.
You’ll also need to decide if you want access to the courses in the Talent Library or not. Adding in the Talent Library will add extra to the cost. However, you do get all the courses from the library to use on your staff.
So, all in all, the pricing options are standard! Some LMS options are incredibly overpriced, but TalentLMS is priced really well. Considering all the features you get, the tool is incredibly well-priced.
Especially the professional option. You get an LMS worth about double or triple the price.
Honestly, though, the best way to check the prices is to visit TalentLMS and see them for yourself.
Final Thoughts
Finding an LMS is always tricky. TalentLMS is one of my favorite options and for the price, you get a hell of a lot of benefits.
