If you weren’t watching closely, you might have missed it. Adobe has been slowly building an incredible learning management system. It is modern, easy to use at every level, and packed with the latest tools and toys for delivering and tracking learning experiences.  With this update Adobe’s LMS is leading the industry with powerful AI/ML driven recommendations, a modern-modular  learner interface that combines the on-demand / self-service paradigm of a Learning Experience Platform with fantastic reporting and analytics solutions to ensure that your organization can meet the learning needs of every department.

Adobe Consolidates much of the HCM Technology Stack with a Modern LMS

Adobe clearly understands the need to simplify and consolidate the sometimes daunting landscape of modern corporate learning with this set of enhancements demonstrates conclusively that it is no longer necessary to spend capital on separate technology solutions for Learning Experience (LXP), Learning Management (LMS), Learning Record Store (LRS) and Social / User Generated experiences.  As we look ahead to a year of potentially hazardous waters for business – cost savings through consolidation are one way that organizations can meet their training needs and reduce their overall cost. Adobe’s award winning LMS provides a solution that not only meets the requirements of all of these separate technology solutions – it exceeds and out-performs them. Perhaps most incredibly – Adobe simultaneously is providing integrations and features that address the growing needs of organizations to market their training programs and content both internally and among their current and future customers.

it is no longer necessary to spend capital on separate technology solutions for Learning Experience (LXP), Learning Management (LMS) and Social / User Generated experiences.

At the center of the marketing of training enhancements is an integration with Marketo Engage, enabling organizations to instantly generate audience lists in Marketo Engage based on learner behavior in the LMS – and an enhanced announcement system which allows system administrators to target teams and groups to receive customized promotions regarding appropriate available courses, seminars, and other resources. You’ll be able to deliver custom marquis ads with calls to action, and to push your own hand-picked course recommendations based on targeted audiences. Learning managers are increasingly called upon to provide marketing campaign like experiences for learning programs and initiatives both internally and among their extended enterprise partners and customers.

This vision of a unified architecture for learning that bridges compliance, customer education, extended enterprise (franchisee & partners), organizational academies (self-guided employee upskilling) and sales and partner training with a common, accessible, intelligent solution marks Adobe as a visionary leader in the LMS, LCMS, LRS, LXP & Social Learning space. In one product Adobe manages to deliver an enterprise ready out of the box solution for virtually any modern training experience.  If you’ve been lumbering along on ancient tech to support your training initiatives, you could easily be bleeding potential revenue gains by failing to leverage one of the single largest assets any organization has – your personnel.

the new regulations will require organizations with shareholders to report measurements of how they attract, develop and enhance personnel. These added requirements are sure to expand the availability of competitive data across all organizations – and will produce new and growing competitive standards

It’s worth noting, that this is a sentiment echoed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As David Vance reported in September, (Chief Learning Officer) the SEC has announced their final ruling on mandatory Human Capital reporting for organizations required to file SEC updates. This marks a significant milestone in organizational requirements / obligation to recognize the most significant universal asset of the organization and convey reliable information about the health of organizational HRM initiatives to shareholders. In a nutshell the new regulations will require organizations with share holders to report measurements of how they attract, develop and enhance personnel. These added requirements are sure to expand the availability of competitive data across all organizations – and will produce new and growing competitive standards to attract and retain people within your organization. Training matters, now more than ever.

Adobe LMS Tackles Customer Education with Zeal

One of the most rapidly rising challenges that organizations are now facing is how to leverage education initiatives to maximize and grow brand loyalty and cross/up selling to new and existing customers. Traditional Learning Management solutions have several limitations that make delivery and tracking of learning content to these audiences problematic for old school technologies. With the integration of Adobe Marketo, Adobe Captivate Prime LMS delivers a solution for Customer Education that introduces substantial additional marketing insights rooted in the behavior of the learner customer while they consume the training. This provides organizations even more opportunity to streamline their technology stack. This technology optimization is further advanced by the integration of learning components with Adobe Enterprise Manager (AEM) Sites. AEM users are able to simply drag and drop Adobe Captivate Prime components – (ready made) right into their overall web content – and need not worry about presenting the front face of elements of Prime in other web sites and domains. If you want a person to see their recommended learning on an external facing website, just drop in the relevant component. This echoes the long standing headless LMS solution available in Prime, and provides AEM Sites users a way to both augment learner dashboard experiences with content coming from any other location / server – and to augment existing internal and external web sites with elements provided by the LMS.  It is an incredible time saver and valuable added benefit of the ‘One Adobe’ paradigm.

What’s new in this update?

The most immediately apparent changes in this update to Adobe Captivate Prime LMS are the stunning visual enhancements present via the ‘Immersive’ learning experience. You are easily able to expand last mile personalization & customize many aspects of the learner dashboard by enabling the new ‘Immersive’ display mode – which includes access to the new marketing, artificial intelligence driven and enhanced engagement features. At a glance you’ll recognize the format which aligns to industry standards for a learning experience platform. Additional features enable marketing campaigns to advertise courses and content to prospective learners, and a plethora of tools designed to surface content for learners that align to their prior choices, their career growth and even to the material that a person’s leadership has associated with people in this role / department or division. Behind the scenes, Adobe’s artificial intelligence engine is evaluating a myriad of data points to surface appropriate and timely recommendations for each learner.

Adobe Captivate Prime is doing the heavy lifting, comparing all of the available information, the patterns of user behavior, the job title and other parameters and further cross referencing that data against the courses and content available in the system.

AI-powered Training Recommendations
Adobe gives you the opportunity to take advantage of the AI-powered recommendation engine and suggest learning programs to users within their landing page. The recommendation logic is based on implicit employee traits drawn from other enterprise HR systems, lookalike traits populated from an extensive resume & skills database, and explicit interests gathered from user input. Learners have an opportunity to browse, augment and alter these surfaced skills / interests in the application – augmenting the AI / ML solution even further.  From a learner perspective – it’s a simple matter of selecting some skills that they believe make sense for them. Adobe Captivate Prime is doing the heavy lifting, comparing all of the available information, the patterns of user behavior, the job title and other parameters and further cross referencing that data against the courses and content available in the system in order to identify relevant matches.

Native Skill Demonstration Checklists
Often modern organizations encounter situations when they need to do directly supervised evaluation of a given person’s ability to perform a skill.  In the face to face world this is often done with pen and paper – a supervisor simply signs off on each skill as the learner demonstrates their proficiency.  Sometimes it is based on yes/no responses, and sometimes their competency level needs to be evaluated and noted.  Now users of Captivate Prime can create the digital version of these checklists, enabling instructors to complete the forms while performing a skill evaluation and facilitating the skill demonstration workflow.  Authors can now create a checklist course designed to evaluate the completion and success of mandatory steps in real-life work processes. Instructors can evaluate learners based on their demonstration and successful completion of each of the steps by providing a score or updating the pass/fail criteria.

Personalized Billboard Ad Unit
The large carousel-style masthead banner at the top of the new immersive learning dashboard may be used to target specific learner groups with organization-wide messages or to drive campaigns to increase enrollments to specific courses and learning programs. You can display images in the masthead, or display video – giving you the ability to target your marketing message in powerful ways. These ‘masthead announcements’ each contain a link out which becomes a call to action for learners – giving you a mechanism to integrate even external events, campaigns or other actions that augment your learner’s experience.

but what if you as the administrator needs to point learners toward specific content that might fall outside of their interests. Adobe Captivate Prime breaks this mold by providing an integrated Admin Recommendation component

Admin Recommended Training Widget
One of the challenges often seen in LXP’s is that there is too little control over what your learners are seeing. Whether driven by AI or simple decision trees, the LXP delivers personalized recommendations – but what if you as the administrator needs to point learners toward specific content that might fall outside of their interests. Adobe Captivate Prime breaks this mold by providing an integrated Admin Recommendation component.  This allows you to deliver courses to specific learner cohorts based on organizational or functional priorities.

Peer Recommended Training Widget
Another great metric for understanding the value of available training is the number of peers who already consumed a piece of training and recommended it to others.  This group of training in the learner home page features course cards for learning content that has been recommended by peers.  Learners see why the content is being recommended to them and admins are able to leverage that information to better understand training consumption patterns.

Customizable Widget-Based Learner Dashboard Design
Admins can easily configure the learner home page via drag-and-drop widgets enabling you to arrange the layout of the page, determine which widgets are right for you, and even use the branding tools to alter the appearance of the course cards. The WYSIWYG preview makes it easy to control the desired learner experience.

Course Cards
A singular, baseball card style view provides all necessary course content and progress information at a glance. This card can easily be used to launch courses, enroll or get more details about the referenced training. Similarly, learners can uncover job aids, learning programs certifications and more – leveraging the same paradigm. All course cards now come with a nifty icon that allows learners to enroll themselves in learning content with a single click.

Now AEM users can integrate Captivate Prime courses right within Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites by taking advantage of the new learning component.

Adobe Experience Manager Learning Component
For organizations that use Adobe Experience Manager to deliver web-based content, many of the big jobs related to content management, branding and site design have been solved with Adobe Experience Manager Sites. Now its users can integrate Captivate Prime courses right within Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites by taking advantage of the new learning component. Elements of the learner home page such as My Learning and Course Recommendations can automatically be synched to the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites front-end using a nifty drag-and-drop workflow that avoids complex coding and expensive implementation costs.  This means that AEM sites users can easily drop recommendations, micro-learning and other aspects normally discovered on the Prime Learner landing page – into any position that is being served via AEM sites. Want to push target appropriate messages to sectors of your personnel on a completely separate site? No problem – it’s now incredibly fast and simple with these components.  Integration experiences like this are what makes Adobe an incredible partner for Enterprise Technology.

Marketo Engage Connector
Customers who are using Marketo Engage – the industry leading marketing campaign solution are now able to leverage data from the learning platform to drive automated marketing campaigns targeted towards customers and partners thanks to this integration with Captivate Prime. Learning data such as user addition, course enrolments, course completions, and skill attainment can be exported from Captivate Prime to create rich audience lists in Adobe Marketo Engage. Learners are added to the marketing solution as trackable leads and create substantial opportunities for tracking, analyzing and understanding both the education / training consumption patterns of customers and their behavior within the LMS – enabling richer understanding of the customer based on their interests, behaviors and demographics.

Weekly Digest Emails
Finally, with this update you can keep your learners continuously engaged with an out-of-the-box communication channel that sends weekly emails to learner groups with essential information such as upcoming trainings, consumption insights, course recommendations, and leaderboard status. This automated solution is simple to enable and personalizes the digest mails providing you with targeted messaging that can increase your training penetration & completion rates, driving steady traffic back to your learning platform.

Understanding how Adobe’s LMS Augments Learner Engagement

One of the reasons that I have such confidence in Adobe’s LMS, Adobe Captivate Prime, is that Adobe has consistently demonstrated a sophisticated comprehension of learner motivation. The solution includes a powerful, extensible gamification engine. It has a phenomenal industry leading social learning and user generated content engine. It actively removes obstacles to learning with the revolutionary fluidic player – eliminating the long-standing problems of delivering blended learning documents via the web. It is out of the box responsive, and this new interface continues Adobe’s commitment to each of these aspects of learner engagement and motivation. The learner interface for the immersive variation of the LMS is completely responsive, delivering an equivalent experience on mobile devices – making every smart phone a viable access point for a modern learning experience that provides just in time support for your team.

Everything from courses, programs and certifications to the informal content derived via social learning contributions is mapped to associated skills.

Adobe combines the fundamental tenets of motivation (purpose, mastery, autonomy and the removal of obstacles) with out-of-the-box solutions in order to ensure that learners remain actively engaged in learning. In addition, a solid foundation is given for aligning the skills of your team, to the content available through the Learning Solution.  Everything from courses, programs and certifications to the informal content derived via social learning contributions is mapped to associated skills. This architecture makes tracking skill development and understanding skill gaps a fundamental aspect of reporting and analytics in Prime. This release carries the aspect of skill definition, customization, integration and reporting a step further with the introduction of an incredible new AI/ML technology that enables team members to self-identify skill interests, and to discover associated skills that are conceptually and organizationally linked. From the learner’s perspective, they are given an opportunity to search and discover skills based on their interest, and from an organizational perspective, you are able to continuously leverage the power of a self-teaching AI/ML engine fed by hundreds of thousands of industry aligned artifacts that help align your approach to industry standards.

Now is the right time to invest in enhancing the potential of your most valuable resource

It may seem counterintuitive that in the wake of such economic peril – and facing another potential long period of depressed economic circumstances, that investing in operational expenses like learning and development is circumspect. The reality however is that your people are your most valuable asset – they are the real strength of any organization – and you want to double down on investments in their upskilling and evolution – now while you have the advantage of their online availability and eagerness to meet employer expectations in a new and evolving world of remote work. Even post-pandemic, we will likely see the number of personnel returning to brick-and-mortar buildings dropping dramatically. In this context it becomes even more imperative to take advantage of this unique window. Ensuring that your approach to education initiatives during this era could well give your organization the lift it needs to outperform the competition in the months and years ahead.