The field of education and training has its own alphabet soup of acronyms, and one of the most powerful, in my opinion, is the acronym LMS: Learning Management System.  

Get ready; you are going to hear a lot from ESA in the coming months about our updated LMS.  

So, what exactly is an LMS and why should you care?

Properly defined, a Learning Management System is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting and delivery of online education courses or online training programs. In the last couple of years these applications have evolved to be even more powerful than the formal description describes. Many of them are cloud or internet hosted, and they track and support live learning events as well as e-learning.  

Five years ago, the main users of an LMS were administrators and instructors. Today, students rely on the LMS as much as the training staff.  

Here at ESA’s National Training School, we have been using an LMS for many years, and we are excited to be moving to a new platform with enhanced features for delivering training and helping customers manage their training history.

The ESA Learning Portal (what we call our LMS) is an accessible and easy-to-use tool for our customers to access their past training records, access current courses and track their progress in completing ESA certifications.  

The upgraded platform will have a refreshed look and make navigating through the site much easier.  

Transcripts are found on the home page and provide students with easy viewing of their completed training records. Here, users can view and print their certificates and certifications. Technician supervisors can also have access to the LMS so that they can keep track of training completions for their assigned employees.  

In addition to tracking and accessing training, the National Training School’s new storefront will make it easier to find and purchase courses based on technicians’ licensing needs or topics of interest. The updated website has pages geared towards state licensing needs, so if someone needs to renew a license in Louisiana, for example, all the CEU courses that are approved in Louisiana will be displayed and can then be purchased seamlessly.  

This will take the guess work out of finding training that is going to help you attain or keep a license. This state licensing information will be a tremendous resource for all companies.  

Our mission at ESA’s National Training School over the next year is to use the LMS to provide better, faster and more efficient service and tools for our training customers. We are extremely excited about the transition we are undergoing — and we know you will be too!  

We are proud to be the industry’s standard in training and education — and will always work to evolve our delivery methods to meet your needs.