41. What is a LMS and Do You Need One?

October 30, 2025

Eric discusses the relevance and effectiveness of Learning Management Systems (LMS) in training employees, particularly in blue-collar industries. He emphasizes the importance of personal development and how it intertwines with workplace performance. Eric critiques the common misconceptions about LMS, arguing that simply having a system does not guarantee effective training or behavior change. He highlights the need for structured training programs, the role of leadership in fostering a training culture, and practical alternatives to LMS for employee training. The conversation also touches on the evolution of learning platforms, comparing LMS with Learning Experience Platforms (LXP), and the necessity of continuous learning in the workplace.

Episode Transcript

Eric (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild.

Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson. And today we're going to be talking about LMSs and do you need one? First of all, real quick, if you are new, Boiler Wild is a acronym of the wild part. If you are wondering what the name is from.

Wild stands for work hard, invest in yourself, lead others, and develop yourself into a person of excellence. I am big on personal development. I think it goes hand in hand with the workplace. don't like the segmentation of work and life outside of work. think life is one big messy plate of everything.

And if you say, well, my work life is this and then my personal life is this, and you don't think that they affect each other, I would say that's very flawed thinking. That doesn't mean you have to work all the time or that doesn't mean that you have to hate work. But if you get better, if you get fitter, if you sharpen your mind outside of work, that is going to affect your work life. And if you have a great work life,

and you like your boss, like your coworkers, you like the projects that you work life, you like the projects that you work with, what you're doing, that is going to positively affect your home life. You're not gonna come home exhausted, you're not gonna take anger out on your spouse and all that stuff. So big fan of personal development and that's not just the woo-woo personal development.

And that's not just the woo-woo personal development. A lot of personal development is just not destroying your life. Most people just implode their lives, whether through debt spending or...

health or relationships and just avoiding hard conversations. But that is for another episode. Today I want to talk about LMSs.

what they are, do you need one, how I would go about it if I were a company, a mechanical company, a boiler company, looking to increase training, increase our knowledge level, how do we, the question is, how do we get our employees trained so that they can fix more problems?

If you are not already aware, a learning management system, and this is nothing new, this has been out for...

20 some years, ever since the internet's been around, basically a learning management system's been around. So a learning management system is a platform, think of it as like software, to host, deliver, and track training content, and it could be really any kind of content. You can put really anything on a LMS, and there's 4,000, that's probably an understatement.

4,000 LMS companies and they all generally do the same thing and it's very difficult to really distinguish between what one does versus the other. There are some very large ones that are more legacy based and there are smaller newer companies that are more nimble that are kind of rolling out features.

But the overall point, I guess, of an LMS is to...

be able to track training content and employee development, which sounds great. However, I would say, unless you have hundreds of employees, you are probably not at the LMS level. So subscribing to an LMS is not what is holding you back.

A lot of people think that the next tool is what's holding them back or if only we had this, if only we had that. And in LMS, cost-wise, you could probably, lower ones are around maybe a thousand a month, and that's on the very, very low end. And a lot of them are user-based.

So depending on how many users you have, the cost is going to go up. But I've talked to an LMS company and their pricing started at $65,000 a year. So that's a hefty price for a piece of software that, you know, what does it do? What is our payback?

So if you are saying, all right, we need to get training, we need to track employees.

One, it's how many employees are you tracking? Do you have a full-time manager for this? If you don't have a full-time manager,

You probably don't have enough employees to justify a LMS. A LMS is a tool. A learning management system is a tool. It is a system. It is not the end result. If a system was all we needed to make people learn, everybody would have one, but it's a tool. It's all about how you use it. And a lot of companies will spend a lot of time

Looking for LMSs going through all the Demos trying a mouth Subscribing getting the onboarding done and Alright, so we get the onboarding done. Everybody gets a log in all your employees

Get emails and they're like, what is this? Great. Now what?

You don't have any training content.

So are we going to just upload a bunch of PDF documents or books to our LMS? You need courses. Okay, so there are courses you can buy and download into an LMS.

But.

Buying content just to buy it does not do your business any good. And there is way too much e-learning content out there that is just an information presentation and doesn't actually prove learning and doesn't change behavior. Remember, when we are looking at training people, we want to always keep in mind

does this change behavior? And when we optimize training, we want to think, all right, does this change behavior at the lowest cost possible in the least amount of time? That is what we would evaluate training for.

Let's pull out a scenario. Say we have a very simple company and we're working on one single boiler. Do I need an LMS to train people how to work on that boiler?

No, I in this case would just say, all right, like let's go out, look at that one boiler, get some GoPros, get some microphones and film a whole day or days of PMs and startups working on the boiler. I would make a unlisted YouTube channel, upload the videos.

label them correctly and put some details in the descriptions and save it. That is good enough. The only difference between an LMS and an unlisted YouTube channel is an LMS can tell you who's watched the video and who hasn't watched the video and you can put some quizzes in it. But

There is a huge hurdle to create training content that actually changes behavior. Remember, we are wanting to change behavior, not just present information. Information is not the problem. Once the internet rolled out and everybody had access to the internet, especially now with their phones, information overload is the problem.

People don't lack information or the ability to access information. They lack the correct information at the correct time period.

So if you don't have a full training manager, if you don't have more than

30 to 50 field employees. If you have no training system in place, if you have no roadmaps for each employee or each job description, if you don't know what the outcomes are of training, of what you want, like what are we actually trying to achieve at this

at the end of the training. If we were to go to training classes for a whole year, what are we actually trying to achieve? If we were to build out training into an LMS system, what are we trying to achieve? If you don't have all that, an LMS system is just going to be a waste of money and it takes somebody to manage it and it takes somebody to make the content for it and it takes somebody to train people on how to use it.

It is, once again, it is a tool and most mechanical HVAC boiler companies, their business is not built around a online tool. And a lot of LMSs are used in compliance training. So there's a lot of industries that you have to prove somebody took a training course.

for compliance and the course doesn't prove that they are competent on the material, all that matters is can you prove that they took the course? And that's what an LMS is for. However, that doesn't work with boilers. You can't just have somebody click through a terrible slide presentation that's computer voice narrated.

of just blocks of text and some AI generated pictures or some generic pictures off the internet and get to the end and have them take some, a very simple quiz of multiple choice questions and say, yep, you're trained. Now go do that in the field. That's a huge gap and doesn't actually prove learning or change behavior.

that is more of just checking the box. And the biggest example for like the boiler world I can think of is just checking the box is whenever I go to a like plant that's like a chemical plant or a manufacturing facility, they will generally have like a contractor safety orientation. And it's not to actually teach you how to be safe.

and like about the facility. is more one they're probably their lawyers said we had to do this, but.

Every single one I've gone to has been a terribly made video or presentation. And they don't actually check that you learn anything. And they basically expect that there's not going to be an emergency or an evacuation. And you you don't really have to know what to do. I remember I traveled and

went to a very very large chemical manufacturer where you know the the site is pretty large and they would have orientations at certain time periods during the day in order to get through the gate you had to go through the orientations and it was a video and they'd pile all these contractors into this orientation room they'd all watch the video and

The test that you are signing off on of you proved that you watched the video was true and false questions and all the questions were true.

So it's like, all right, are we actually teaching people about our plant? Are we actually teaching them where to go in evacuation? If there's a chemical release, how to look at windsocks? Are we making sure that they understand that? And that's no, we're just checking a box. That is what most LMS training does. It's just to check a box. And it looks good to advertise.

we have 20 courses on this and all this stuff, but the the average login rate for an LMS for corporate America and I would say corporate America is like people working at a computer. That's what I'm talking about is for non Mandatory courses is less than 10 % I believe it's less than 5 % but I know it's less than 10 %

So people that sit at a computer all day that work off a intranet or a company software and do something, I don't know, customer service, whatever.

They have access to an LMS system, a learning management system, and they have access to all these wonderful courses the company has paid for or employees, instructional designers, that they put together these beautiful courses that...

supposedly teach people something yet most of them are terribly done and Nobody wants to go through them and we've all been there you go to do a class that you have to do and You log in and you just see if you can just click next next next next next and get through the end and just take the quiz You don't actually care or you already know the information

So that's a huge problem. So just because you have an LMS, one, doesn't mean everybody's just gonna be super excited to log in. I would say that an LMS is very equivalent to having a library. If you have a library of books, and not even like library, if you have a shelf in your office of books, of boiler-related books, steam, hydronics, burners, anything.

Or if you offer to buy books for people, if you have some after hours, informal kind of training and all this stuff, if you offer resources and people barely use them, the same is going to apply if you have resources on an LMS. Only they're more hidden because you can't actually see the resources. Like you can walk past a bookcase of books and be like, ⁓ man, you maybe I should check out one of these and.

Read it.

However, most employees are not going to do that. They're not going to just because you're paying 10 grand a year for an LMS doesn't mean that your employees are going to care. They're going to care the same amount. And then you're going to wonder why you have to whip people to try to log in. But that's for corporate America. So now let's go into people that are actually fixing problems out in the field.

service technicians, operators, whoever. They're probably working off their phone. A lot of people don't have a computer. They're working off their phone. They're on the road.

A LMS traditionally is not set up for them to learn. I'm not saying that you can't use an LMS, but

Everything is set up not really for the blue collar HVAC boiler construction trades. It is possible, but an LMS is a tool. And if you think it is holding you back and you don't have the systems to actually set up inside the LMS before you have the LMS, the systems are not going to be set up in place.

now that you're paying 10 grand a year for an LMS. You will waste 10 grand and you will not be any farther on your training and development.

LMSs are also changing. There are a lot of legacy ones out there of companies. There are a lot of newer companies. Now that everything, especially in SaaS software as a service.

Everybody is tacked on an AI feature. AI has promised tons of capability. If you actually dig into it, it has very limited capability. And a lot of LMSs have tacked on an AI course authoring tool and a ⁓ demo person, a sales demo person.

If they get ahold of your company and they say, ⁓ we have this LMS, and you're like, well, we don't have any tools or any program or any teaching to put inside the LMS, they're going to say, well, we have an AI course authoring tool. And this authoring tool can build out courses. And then you can just fill up your whole LMS with courses.

And it sounds great. And I'm sure it could be great. But in reality, it just ends up being a mush of information. Garbage in, garbage out. If you don't supply great structured information with structured prompts and actually have a thought out process, the AI course authoring tool is going to just spit out garbage.

Like I could have a AI tool write blog posts for me. And there are boiler companies on LinkedIn that I see who write blog posts with an AI tool and they...

seem like they...

Tell the AI tool, write me a blog post on this topic and it writes it, they copy paste it on their website and say, look at this blog post. If you, it seems great. ⁓ wow, we have five paragraphs on this topic. But if you actually like read into it, it says a whole lot of nothing and it can say some inaccurate stuff. That's like partial truth, but it's like.

If we'd span that out and say, I can tell an AI tool, hey, write me a 40 page book on something. We'd have to chunk it down because of limitations of the AI tool, the output tokens. But I could write a 40 page book very quickly and print it out and be like, look, 40 page book. at all these words. Well, words do not create value.

And remember, going back to the original.

end goal of training. Does this actually change behavior? Does this actually drive performance? Can they solve more problems because of this? And just because a tool exists like an LMS does not mean that that tool is what is stopping you from changing behavior and driving performance. And I'm going to tell you right now that it's probably not the thing. LMS is

basically from my experience have evolved just from the corporate world of compliance and top down leadership. I even say leadership, but top down, you will do this or else. We need you to.

fit in line or else and it's a management tool. It's easy to manage employees and have them click through a course. If an employee attendee in training or going on an LMS and taking an e-learning course, if that's what it took to actually train people, training would be super simple and we would have all the people. But as

you've probably figured out by now just because somebody attends a course or they take an e-learning course or they go to manufacturers training that does not actually mean that they can do what the course says that they're going to do and that's probably partially mostly on the course designer and it's also on the person so

I have seen people go to manufacturers training. They come back and they cannot start up the equipment. Even though that they have a certificate that says that they are now certified to start up this equipment, they can't. And there's a whole tons of reasons for that. But just because training exists does not mean that the end result

is a guarantee and that's the whole point of the LMS. Now you will also hear people start talking about an LXP, a learning experience.

Now you will also start hearing people talk about an LXP, which is a learning experience platform. And this is basically like an LMS. So think of an LMS as a very structured, unchanging platform of software, how you set it up, how you set up the content, how you assign content to people, everything is structured and never changes. And LXP,

is a variation of an LMS and it is more of like a fluid environment that's structured for the learner. And the easiest way to compare this is a streaming site like Netflix or Amazon Prime or any of them. You watch a particular TV show and then under that TV show at the end, hey, you watch this.

We recommend this and that recommends TV shows. And if you were to go to your neighbor's house and they log into their Netflix account, their Netflix and what is recommended is different than what you see on your Netflix. And that is because all the content is tailored to the user and changes based on your preferences and what you actually do. That is a learning experience plan.

All what I said about LMS is the same. It's set that this is now more fluid. is better structure, better for employees, for how people learn. However, if the content sucks, it's still going to be garbage in, garbage out.

So that's all I'm gonna say about LXPs, but don't be sold or think, well, we just need this platform. We just need this tool. It requires a lot of oversight. It requires to have the content to put in. And if you are just buying content from other providers and throwing it into your...

LMS or LXP wherever you know thrown it into the system and you don't actually have a plan for how this content is going to drive behavior change for your people it's just a waste of money and you are doing work with no Direct outcome or change to the business and you look busy which seems good. ⁓ we have all these You know, you can you can buy I can buy electrical training

and download it into an LMS and say, we now have over 100 courses of electrical training. And then how this plays out is you now say, you send out an email, say, hey, everybody, you should have gotten an email. We have over 100 courses of electrical training. Please start working through the courses. And you may get some people to log in.

They may, you know, the ones that are curious may start going through the courses, but quickly they're going to drop off because one, the e-learning content is probably garbage. Most e-learning content is absolute garbage and is just an information presentation and unbearable to listen to or watch or read. Secondly,

People don't understand how doing all that work is going to relate to their job. If we had infinite amount of time and money, we would theoretically want people to learn everything they possibly can. However, that is not the case. So if you are a manager, if you are an owner of a company and you need to train your employees, you need to figure out

All right, if I have service technicians, if I have boiler operators, what problems are we experiencing the most? One, to like fill short-term gaps. What can we train up on the most? But over the long term, what exact information do they need to know in order to be successful at their job? And then what is their career path? And that is...

Most companies don't do that. companies just... Their employees exist. If they learn, great. If they don't learn, fine. But they have no career path or progress that is laid out and is provable. ⁓

You need to set that up and don't think that that is some giant system. It's easy to do a little bit. Don't try to eat an elephant in one sitting. That's for another podcast. I will talk about that.

But just know garbage in, garbage out. Don't let a salesperson convince you that an AI authoring tool and an LMS or an LXP is what's stopping you from having trained employees. It is not. The number one.

The number one.

The number one thing that is stopping you from having trained service technicians, boiler operators, salespeople, engineers is leadership. And then two is systems. And I'm not sure which one to put it at one. Do leaderships drive systems or systems drive leadership? Theoretically, you can set up systems and the leaders enforce the systems.

work within the systems and change the systems to grow and build out the company. But a lot of times leaders don't have systems at all levels and they need to drive their particular area of the business without working in a system. There probably isn't a...

job task or you these are all your responsibilities in order for you to do your job at most companies. A service manager, they may have a job task and all that stuff but they figure out problems that come their way and at the end of the day they understand they're there to help.

the people under them and to help customers.

However, the leadership and systems of a company are what drives training. If a company sees training as we'll get to it when we have some spare time or we'll get to it in the off season or we'll get to it when profits from the quarter come back good or we'll get to it whenever we're not busy.

and that'll be in two months, you will have terrible training culture, you will have terrible employee growth, and you will feel like you never get anywhere.

Training and development is not something that you can just put off and get to and Plug in whenever you need it It is something that has been ingrained in the culture and if somebody is newer at their job say you're hiring a service technician and You know you're hiring somebody that is 20 years old very low mechanical experience

the amount of training that they need is going to be much different than somebody who is 50 years old and has been in the industry for 20 years. However, if you don't constantly talk about learning and learning from other people's experiences on the site, hey, I saw this, this was a problem that we came across, you know, like.

Let's have a meeting. Let's talk about it with other people. Let's show the pictures of what happened so that this doesn't happen anywhere else. A lot of ⁓ companies think training needs to this big, formal shindig where you have somebody come in or you have a subject matter expert in the company make a PowerPoint and stand up and talk about their slides.

and everybody's sitting there and there's workbooks or paper and it needs to last hours and hours and hours. That is not true. Training is by definition anything that changes the behavior and a little bit of training consistently over time is better than an overload of training very sporadically. As I've talked on previous podcasts,

And I'll say it again, there is a cognitive load for every single person when they go through training. You cannot dump, like if somebody doesn't know English, you can't just have them read the dictionary and then they're like, yeah, all right, I know all the words now. That's not how it works. The same thing with boilers. You cannot just sign somebody up for a month of training.

And they get to the end and they're like, all right, yep, I feel good on all the everything that went over and I retain 100 % of it. People forget over 70 % of training within like six days of when they take it. So it has to be a little bit over a long period of time, but it has to be framed and you have to give them a mental model of why it matters. Why are you actually learning this?

If you can't tell them and directly related to their job of why they're actually learning it, then it's pointless and they're not going to remember it because why would they remember it other than maybe it's just a fun fact. But if it doesn't actually change their job behavior and it doesn't get them paid more money or have them or have the ability to solve more problems, then it is pointless and you need to cut it out. And that's why the.

And that's why Boilern's mission statement is to drive continuous learning and improvement. Keyword is continuous. I thought about that statement. I know it doesn't mean much because I'm not a giant company, but I thought about that statement.

for a long time when I was starting over two years ago of what does, what does it actually mean to do training? And a lot of training is...

two to three days, and then six months later, it may be two to three days, and then employers wonder why people struggle to learn, and it's just on the job training in between, which is a whole nother podcast, but if you only have six days of structured training for the entire year, for somebody who is less than five years experience,

You expect them to be good at their job with less than six days of structured training and statistically they forget 70 % of what they learned six days after the training happens. Like, yeah, no wonder they're struggling and yeah, no wonder you're frustrated. There needs to be, both sides need to have realistic expectations but the...

amount of training that is needed for people to actually change their behavior is a lot more than what companies.

think, but you know, it's, it's a hard thing because contracting or most companies in the mechanical space don't have amazing gross margins and they're just printing cash. So you hire somebody and you try to get them billable and you know, you're just not writing off like, we don't have six months of salary just to give you just to learn. So I understand that part.

And there's all different ways to go about it. But the whole point of this episode was don't let the entire elephant stop you from just getting a plate done. And I highly recommend you have to start somewhere. But I highly recommend if you have nothing, it is free to make an unlisted YouTube channel. So if you don't know.

So YouTube, obviously the great video sharing platform, and you can make public videos too, but you can make it unlisted. So when it's unlisted, basically only certain people can see it and you can share it around your company and not the general public or general internet. And if you were to go on YouTube and search for the video, it wouldn't appear, it's unlisted. That's what that means. And you don't need,

anything special other than a simple action camera or your phone and a microphone. A microphone is the number one important tool. If you have low, low budget, and I would recommend low budget over a expensive camera and lighting and all this stuff, you can do a phone and have a magnetic microphone.

and maybe have a ⁓ small light that attaches to the back of your phone. And you can talk about what you're seeing. You can talk about what other people are doing. You can film them. That goes way farther than, well, we got to get a videographer. We got to get a $4,000 camera. We got to get professional microphones and wireless mic packs. And we got to get lighting. And we got to edit this professionally and do it like.

All that stuff is friction that stops. What is the goal? The goal is to change behavior and can the person solve more problems? And if you take a quick cell phone video that is 10 minutes long of you rebuilding a valve or you doing something and somebody else watches that, that will probably help them more than one if you just

telling them how to do it or two you having to drive out to a job site to show them how to do it or three having a professional setup do it because all that extra stuff is just it's nice but it is not required especially for an internal training video get it done get it dirty and do it

and then you can always come back and build upon it and sharpen it up. But the number one thing with training videos are audio. If the audio sucks, it's gonna suck. And then if it's a shaky camera, get a, if you are having to do something.

get a very cheap gimbal or even just a tripod and set it up. If you have a shaky camera and somebody that doesn't know how to like hold the camera, that gets pretty annoying. At bare minimum, just get a very cheap tripod that holds a phone, set it up. You can buy wireless microphones that plug into your phone for less than $200 and you are good to go.

I would highly recommend that and then start building out.

On paper, this doesn't require any software. Start building out a learning path for a person. And just think about what is the next thing that they need to do? What do you know now? What is the next thing you need to do? And how are we going to learn that? How are we going to change your behavior in order to do something? And I think a lot of companies, they see somebody that is under-educated from where they need to be or where they want them, and they just think, well,

How are we going to teach them these four books of information? Like they just need to know all this stuff and it's like, well, we just need to narrow it down. What is the next thing that they need to know that is the most valuable thing? So if somebody is learning steam systems, understanding what a fire to boiler is and a water to boiler and the design systems of it, that sounds great.

But they don't actually need to know that. They need to know what the water's doing. How does the water and energy move the entire system? How does the boiler and the water softener and the feed water tank or the deaerator and the steam traps and the piping, how does this all work together? That's what they need to know. They're not hung up on, that's a nice to know. ⁓ they need to know what a fire tube boiler is. No, all they need to know is

The boiler generates heat which boils the water and turns it into steam. That is the bare minimum. And you can come back, but that is not what is stopping them from learning a steam system. Same thing with hydronics. They don't understand how water moves, why pressure is important in hydronic systems, what a condensing boiler is, and why set point and condensing is important.

versus like a non-condensing, like that is core stuff versus, well, they just need to learn the very specifics of this boiler so that they can do a PM. Yes, I guess so, but most condensing boiler PMs are pretty self-explanatory and the manual tells you how to do it. But if they don't understand why a pump is there, pump direction, why you need to have certain system pressure, why...

a pumping arrangement versus another pumping arrangement, then they're just memorizing and all they see are pipes and stuff in the mechanical room and anytime something goes wrong, they just get overwhelmed. But once you start seeing and visualizing how energy and water moves through the system and, this is done like that because of this, you start connecting dots and it's not about memorization, it's about understanding. So I will...

Leave you with that, but I just want to save you. If you want to write me a check of 50 % of the money saved not subscribing to an LMS system, I would be more than happy to give you an address to send you that check. But don't fool yourself into thinking an LMS or an LXP or other some learning management system online is what's stopping you from training your employees.

And don't be fooled by an AI authoring tool. They mostly suck right now. And they are not going to just build out a training program for you. They can help you, but it is not an automatic.

I would work on making sure that training is something that a company does.

all the time, consistently talking about it, doing it, and by doing it, once again, a 20-minute Zoom call of all your technicians in the morning talking about a problem or just having a chit chat, service manager giving a pep talk. That is training, too, of, let's go out and let's make sure our customers were telling them exactly this and smiling and shaking their hands and introducing.

And like all this stuff, like that 20 little minute video, like that's training. does. Well, once again, it doesn't have to be this, ⁓ eight hours, multiple days, travel off site, get a professional trainer in. Let's have PowerPoint slides. Let's have lunch. ⁓ like that is, it's just a lot of extra. The think about how can we remove layers and what actually

changes behavior and performance. If you tell your service technicians every single day and remind them, hey, when you walk into a room and you go to greet a customer, I want you to shake their hand, look them in the eye, say your name, hey, it's nice to see you, how's it going and all this stuff. And like you build out a framework for them and you just beat that into their heads over and over again. And then you ask them how it's going. And then you ask customers and all this stuff. And they're like, man, your service techs.

They're so nice. They look me in the eye. They shake my hand. was like, people, people notice, but that is training. Like, like I said, it doesn't have to be this huge built out system where you're like, how, how are we going to do this? How are we going to don't do it randomly? Like have a plan. Don't do training just to have training, but think about, all right, what is something that we need to work on and how can we do it in the shortest amount of time in order to change behavior and chunk it down? So

That is all I have today. Hopefully you found those valuable. If you did, please leave a five-star review. If you want to leave a comment or talk to me or anything, you can DM me on LinkedIn or reach out at my email, eric.johnson at Boilearn.com Please tell somebody about this podcast. If you want to be a guest or know somebody that should be a guest.

Let me know. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you all and stay wild.

41. What is a LMS and Do You Need One?

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