The LinkedIn report mentions several challenges that L&D professionals are grappling with today. These include

•   limited budgets
•   getting employees to make time for L&D
•   having a small L&D team
•   demonstrating ROI
•   aligning to the company’s overall strategy
•   building employee awareness of L&D programs
•   getting executive buy-in
•   engaging employees during L&D programs
•   a lack of data and insights to understand which solutions are effective
•   having old or outdated content
•   having L&D decentralized within the company.

But dispelling the unrest over these challenges, UpsideLMS has been busy shaping its LMS into a stellar toolset that is equipped with potent features to handle them. Among its main attributes are

1. It offers value for money: UpsideLMS’s SaaS-based architecture provides fast deployment with best-in-class security, scalability, and reliability. It’s a great fit for companies with limited L&D budgets thanks to its lower set-up costs, plus free technical support and regular updates. UpsideLMS is known to reduce the TCO, maximising the impact of learning programs while assuring speed, innovation, and higher ROI.
2. It facilitates easy learning: UpsideLMS’s light and responsive HTML 5 design enables learners to access it seamlessly from any device of their choice – be it desktops, laptops, tablets, or smartphones, and across a wide range of browsers and platforms. Further, its point-based CPD module, Compliance Training, Social Learning & Knowledge Collaboration ensures that learning happens as a part of the day-to-day activities, thereby obviating the need for making employees 'find time' separately for L&D.
3. It is future proofed: One of the challenges cited by L&D professionals is that the LMS often does not match the company’s overall learning strategy and comes with archaic features that do not help the effort. UpsideLMS is a mix of innovative features that helps a company to stay ahead of the curve and traditional features that are needed to carry out the routine learning/training activities. This ensures that the LMS stays relevant and in line with the company’s learning objectives for a longer period of time.
4. It stimulates learner engagement: UpsideLMS’ simple navigation and workflows - especially designed from the users’ perspective - facilitate learner engagement like never before. UpsideLMS’s user-friendly UI; enhanced interface designs for Catalogue and Learning Plan; flexible Batch Management module with ability for learners to self-enroll, etc,; ability to stream videos and deliver learning/ training in a blended format; and social-learning and knowledge-collaboration components provide an enhanced user experience and thereby underpin high learner engagement. In an age in which the focus of learning is leaning towards informal learning, UpsideLMS drives out concerns about learner engagement and knowledge retention.
5. It generates business intelligence: An LMS calls for requisite tools to gather data that can be studied to gain insights into which solutions are proving to be effective for the company. Features like MIS and reporting come in handy for deriving business intelligence and is a good way to calculate ROI. UpsideLMS is integrated with enhanced MIS and reporting tools to assist L&D professionals in translating learning-management data into meaningful information that improves processes.
6. It features ready-to-use, updated content: As pointed out by the LinkedIn report, another challenge faced by companies is outdated and old content that does little in updating the employees’ knowledge. While companies can opt for creating up-to-date, customised courses, a time-consuming option, UpsideLMS offers a comprehensive library of ready-to-use catalogue courses (aka “off-the-shelf” or “OTS” courses) that are fast to deploy, easy on the pocket, and effective in addressing learning needs.
7. It comprises multi-portal architecture: An LMS equipped with multi-portal architecture is the perfect solution for companies that face issues of decentralisation when it comes to their LMS. UpsideLMS’s multi-portal architecture enables extended enterprise training or hosting multiple departments/ clients on the same setup. Distinctive branding policies, branding each portal, separate URL, etc. are possible with the UpsideLMS.

Amit Gautam, UpsideLMS’s Director and Upside Learning’s co-founder, summarises this well by saying, "As new challenges continue to emerge in the L&D space, it is crucial that learning-management systems be well equipped to help companies overcome their current and future challenges in the most efficient and effective way. Our SaaS learning-management system, UpsideLMS, has been built on this very belief. We are confident that it can help an organisation succeed with its L&D initiatives in 2017 and beyond!"