New programming languages emerge, frameworks evolve, security threats become more sophisticated, and development practices continue to shift.

For technical teams, staying current is no longer optional. Continuous learning has become a core business requirement.

The challenge is that most organisations struggle to train technical employees at scale. Developers, engineers, IT professionals, and cybersecurity specialists often have different learning needs, experience levels, and career paths. Traditional training methods can be difficult to manage, expensive to maintain, and hard to measure.

This is where LMS software has become an essential tool for modern organisations. A learning management system provides a centralised platform for delivering training, tracking progress, managing onboarding, and supporting long-term professional development.

Instead of relying on disconnected documents, occasional workshops, or informal mentoring, companies can create structured learning experiences that help technical teams gain skills faster and more consistently.

In this article, we'll explore how LMS software helps technical teams accelerate learning, improve onboarding, strengthen knowledge sharing, and build scalable training programs that support continuous growth.

What We'll Cover:

• Why Technical Teams Need Continuous Upskilling

• Accelerating Technical Onboarding

• Creating Structured Learning Paths

• Supporting Knowledge Sharing Across Teams

• Delivering Consistent Technical Training

• Measuring Learning Progress and Skill Development

• Choosing the Right Learning Platform

• Enabling Self-Paced Learning

• Supporting Certification and Compliance Requirements

• Scaling Learning as Organisations Grow

• Building a Culture of Continuous Learning

• Conclusion

Why Technical Teams Need Continuous Upskilling

Technical skills have a shorter lifespan than ever before. Developers who mastered a framework three years ago may already need to learn new tools and methodologies. Cybersecurity professionals must constantly adapt to emerging threats. Cloud engineers need to keep pace with rapidly evolving platforms and services.

Organisations that fail to invest in ongoing learning often experience reduced productivity, slower innovation, and greater difficulty retaining talent. Employees want opportunities to develop their skills and advance their careers. When learning opportunities are limited, engagement often declines.

Continuous upskilling helps teams remain competitive while enabling businesses to adopt new technologies more effectively. But maintaining an ongoing learning culture requires more than simply providing access to educational content. Teams need structured pathways, measurable outcomes, and easy access to relevant training resources.

A Learning Management System (LMS) provides the infrastructure needed to support this process at scale.

Accelerating Technical Onboarding

One of the biggest challenges for technical organisations is onboarding new employees efficiently.

New hires often need to learn company-specific systems, development workflows, coding standards, security requirements, infrastructure architecture, and collaboration processes. When onboarding relies heavily on manual training, the experience can vary significantly between employees.

An LMS helps standardise the onboarding process by providing a consistent learning path for every new team member.

Instead of searching through documentation scattered across multiple systems, new hires can access training materials, videos, guides, assessments, and practical exercises from a single platform. Organisations can create role-specific onboarding programs for software engineers, DevOps professionals, QA testers, data engineers, and other technical positions.

This structured approach reduces confusion and helps employees become productive more quickly. It also ensures that critical knowledge is delivered consistently, regardless of team size or location.

As organisations continue to hire remote and distributed technical talent, standardised onboarding has become increasingly important for maintaining productivity and alignment.

Creating Structured Learning Paths

Technical professionals often need to master multiple skills simultaneously. A backend developer may need training in cloud architecture, security practices, API design, performance optimisation, and emerging frameworks.

Without structure, learning can become fragmented and inefficient.

LMS platforms allow organisations to build customised learning paths that guide employees through training in a logical sequence. Foundational concepts can be completed before advanced topics, ensuring learners develop a strong understanding before moving forward.

For example, a cloud engineering learning path might begin with cloud fundamentals before progressing to infrastructure automation, monitoring, security, and cost optimisation.

This organised approach helps employees focus on the most relevant skills while reducing the risk of knowledge gaps.

Structured learning paths also help managers identify progress and ensure training aligns with business objectives.

Supporting Knowledge Sharing Across Teams

Many organisations possess valuable technical knowledge that exists only in the minds of experienced employees.

Senior developers, architects, and engineers often accumulate years of expertise that can be difficult to transfer to newer team members. When this knowledge isn't documented effectively, organisations face increased risk when employees leave or change roles.

An LMS helps transform institutional knowledge into reusable learning resources.

Teams can create internal courses covering development standards, deployment processes, troubleshooting procedures, security guidelines, and best practices. Recorded training sessions, documentation, walkthroughs, and demonstrations can be stored in a centralised location where employees can access them whenever needed.

This creates a sustainable knowledge-sharing system that benefits both current and future employees.

Instead of repeatedly answering the same questions, experienced team members can contribute to training content that scales across the organisation.

Delivering Consistent Technical Training

Consistency is essential when training technical teams.

Differences in training quality can lead to inconsistent coding practices, security vulnerabilities, operational errors, and reduced collaboration. When employees receive different information from different trainers, maintaining standards becomes more difficult.

An LMS ensures every learner receives the same core training materials and assessments.

Organisations can establish standardised programs for secure coding practices, compliance requirements, cloud governance, incident response procedures, and software development methodologies.

This consistency becomes especially valuable in larger organisations where teams operate across multiple locations or departments.

A centralised training platform helps ensure everyone follows the same standards regardless of where they work.

Measuring Learning Progress and Skill Development

One of the most significant advantages of LMS software is visibility into learning outcomes.

Traditional training programs often make it difficult to determine whether employees have actually acquired new skills. Attendance alone doesn't indicate understanding or competency.

Learning management systems provide reporting and analytics capabilities that help organisations track progress more effectively.

Managers can monitor course completion rates, assessment scores, certification achievements, and learning engagement. This data helps identify employees who may need additional support while highlighting areas where training programs can be improved.

For technical teams, measurable learning outcomes are particularly valuable because they help align training investments with business goals.

Organisations gain a clearer understanding of which skills are being developed and where additional training may be required.

Choosing the Right Learning Platform

The success of a training program depends not only on the content but also on the platform used to deliver it. Different organisations have different learning requirements based on team size, budget, technical expertise, and training objectives.

For example, TalentLMS is a popular choice for organisations that want a straightforward platform for employee onboarding, compliance training, and technical upskilling. Its ease of use and quick deployment make it well-suited for teams that need to launch structured learning programs without significant administrative overhead.

Organisations that prefer greater flexibility and control may choose Moodle, one of the most widely adopted open-source learning management systems. Moodle allows businesses to customise learning experiences extensively and to support a wide range of technical training requirements.

Some companies also supplement internal training programs with external learning platforms such as Udemy Business. These platforms provide access to thousands of courses covering software development, cloud computing, cybersecurity, data science, and other technical disciplines, helping employees expand their skills beyond organisation-specific training.

The right choice depends on an organisation's goals, resources, and learning strategy. Regardless of the platform selected, the objective remains the same: providing employees with accessible, structured learning opportunities that support continuous professional development.

Enabling Self-Paced Learning

Technical folks often have demanding schedules that make traditional classroom training difficult.

Development cycles, production support responsibilities, and project deadlines can limit opportunities for scheduled learning sessions. Employees need flexibility to learn at times that fit their workloads.

LMS platforms support self-paced learning by allowing employees to access training whenever it is convenient.

Learners can revisit complex topics, repeat modules, and progress through courses at their own speed. This flexibility improves engagement while accommodating different learning styles and experience levels.

Self-paced learning is particularly effective for technical subjects where individuals may require additional time to understand advanced concepts or experiment with new technologies.

Supporting Certification and Compliance Requirements

Many technical roles require ongoing certification and compliance training.

Cybersecurity professionals, cloud engineers, network administrators, and IT specialists frequently need to maintain industry certifications and stay current with regulatory requirements.

Managing these requirements manually can become difficult as organisations grow.

An LMS simplifies certification management by tracking completion dates, monitoring renewal requirements, and delivering required training automatically.

Employees receive clear visibility into their certification status while administrators can ensure compliance obligations are being met across the organisation.

This reduces administrative overhead while helping teams maintain critical professional credentials.

Scaling Learning as Organisations Grow

Training processes that work for a small team often become unsustainable as companies expand.

As organisations hire more engineers, developers, and technical specialists, manual training approaches become increasingly resource-intensive. Senior employees may spend significant amounts of time repeating onboarding sessions or answering routine questions.

LMS software provides a scalable solution.

Once training content is created, it can be delivered repeatedly to large numbers of employees with minimal additional effort. Organisations can expand learning programs without requiring proportional increases in training resources.

This scalability supports growth while maintaining training quality and consistency.

Whether a company is onboarding ten engineers or one thousand, a learning management system helps deliver a standardised learning experience.

Building a Culture of Continuous Learning

Technology organisations thrive when learning becomes part of everyday work.

Rather than treating training as an occasional event, leading companies encourage employees to continuously develop new skills and explore emerging technologies.

An LMS helps reinforce this culture by making learning accessible, measurable, and integrated into professional development plans.

Employees gain access to ongoing educational opportunities while managers can align learning initiatives with career growth objectives. Regular training becomes a natural component of team development rather than a separate activity competing for attention.

Over time, this creates a workforce that adapts more effectively to technological change and contributes more actively to innovation.

Conclusion

Technical teams operate in an environment where knowledge evolves constantly. Organisations that want to remain competitive must provide structured, scalable, and measurable ways for employees to develop new skills.

LMS software addresses this challenge by centralising training, accelerating onboarding, supporting knowledge sharing, enabling continuous learning, and providing visibility into skill development. It helps organisations create consistent learning experiences while giving employees the flexibility to learn at their own pace.

As technical roles become increasingly specialised and technology continues to evolve, learning management systems are no longer simply training tools. They have become strategic platforms that help organisations build stronger teams, preserve institutional knowledge, and accelerate workforce development.

For companies seeking to improve technical onboarding, support continuous upskilling, and create scalable learning processes, an LMS can play a central role in achieving those goals.

Hope you enjoyed this article. You can connect with me on LinkedIn.

Believe it or not, there have already been some important updates.

That article began by introducing some powerful data tools for assessing the likely economic consequences of enrolling in individual US colleges.

Those tools are designed to give us insights into completion and loan default rates. And to which programs are the most likely to lead to financial success - or at least to eventually deliver enough employment income to cover your tuition. Spoiler alert: not all will get you there.

Nothing much has changed in that department, so there's nothing more for me to say on that topic.

But the second half of the article focused on analyzing data from the 2018 freeCodeCamp New Coder Survey. That survey allowed us to explore some of the real-world costs and benefits of enrolling in coding bootcamps, online learning resources and, of course, freeCodeCamp.

In particular, we looked at the income and outstanding student debt reported by many of the 30,000 people who responded to the survey. Do expensive bootcamps translate to larger salaries? How about for-profit online training platforms? Do college degrees guarantee higher income?

The 2021 freeCodeCamp New Coder Survey

Since then, however, the results of the 2021 version of the survey came out. The new questions didn't all follow exactly the same formatting they used in 2018.

For instance, respondents weren't broken down by country, but by region. Therefore, instead of looking at just US learners, we'll work with all North America. And income was reported as brackets (i.e., $40,000 to $49,999) rather than actual numbers.

To make things easier, I converted the brackets to an average (meaning, "$40,000 to $49,999" became $45,000) so they'll be approximations.

As before, the numbers from the survey are just numbers. Just because the average freeCodeCamp learner experienced greater or less success with a particular resource doesn't mean that everyone will.

And just because the average college graduate in the survey is stuck with a significant amount of student debt – 59% of their annual income, in fact – doesn't mean that that's what you'll face.

And, of course, correlation is not the same as causation. Just because consumers of one resource earn more income than consumers of another, doesn't mean it was the resource that made the difference. There may be important factors we're simply not taking into account.

Still, these numbers can be really useful, and we'd be foolish to ignore them as we make our plans.

Bootcamps vs Online Learning Platforms

According to our analysis of the 2018 survey, in-person bootcamps underperformed, online learning tools like Pluralsight and Coursera proved much more cost-effective, and freeCodeCamp – naturally – provided fantastic value.

Has that changed? Was Pluralsight's incredible 2018 result (the income for the average Pluralsight learner was $52,895 – around 10% more than BA graduates) just a fluke?

Here's how all that now looks using the 2021 survey data:

Income (in blue) VS Debt (in orange)

As you can see, the blue bars represent income from a particular resource, while orange shows us debt. Fortunately, the average user of all the included resources earns more in a year than their average debt.

Students of all in-person bootcamps reported a level of student debt-load ($22,476) that was second only to college graduates ("All_Degrees"). Their income, however, wasn't even close to that of college grads ($41,972 vs $48,576). Does that qualify as "under performing"? I can't say.

You can easily see that the highest student loan debt is for graduates of all degree programs. Considering the cost of college tuition and living expenses, that's just what we'd expect. Equally predictably, we've already seen how income for college grads is also higher.

As I disclosed in the previous article, I produce courses for Pluralsight, so I have a bit of a personal interest here. I'll therefore forgive you for scoffing when I tell you just how effective I believe that their course library is.

But that old result was clearly no fluke. The average Pluralsight learner now earns more than $59,000 a year – a 9% increase over 2018 – and carries only $22,180 of student debt.

Displaying Income and Debt Outcomes by Education

Getting a good sense of the income experiences of our freeCodeCamp respondents can be tricky. It turns out that there are some outliers, meaning a few people in each category who earn a lot more (or have a lot more debt) than most of their peers.

I could manually remove most or all of the outliers and concentrate on the main body of results, but that risks artificially skewing the remaining data. And it also involves way too much work for my taste.

So instead, I'll visualize the data using box plots. The advantage of a box plot is that outliers remain visible, but the fact that they're represented by dots far above or below the mainstream "boxes" means that their relationship to the rest of the data is obvious.

In the above plot showing income by educational level, the median income is represented by the line in the middle of a box, the box itself encompasses the middle 50% of the data set, and the "whiskers" are the minimum and maximum values not including the outliers.

As you can see, individuals with professional degrees and Ph.Ds earn the greatest incomes, while those without high school diplomas or trade certificates earn the least. No surprises there.

Let's use the same box plot method to view student debt-loads:

Again, nothing shocking. College graduates hold the most student debt.

That single outlier with a high school diploma and $600,000 of student debt is interesting. I suspect someone clicked the wrong option at some point. Which proves just how useful box plots can be for this kind of visualization.

The fact that, on the whole, those income/debt results we're getting are fairly predictable confirms that the survey has given us pretty good data. Which should make our earlier insights at least a bit more reliable.

Feel free to check out the original Python code used to generate these insights and visualizations.

We've released a full course on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel that will teach you how to use Microsoft Excel from the beginning. You will learn by creating 6 real-world projects. Most of the content applies to Google Sheets as well.

The course was created by Shad Sluiter. Shad is a professor of computer science at Grand Canyon University. Over the past 20 years he has taught students from grade 6 to senior citizens in many aspects of technology.

Excel is one of the most used tools in business, engineering, accountancy and many more industries. It helps you organize and manipulate a large amount of data which can be otherwise time-consuming, mundane, and difficult to organize.

If you are in the business sector, learning Excel is a necessity. It helps you manage inventory, human resources, and finances.

In this Excel course, you will learn how to:

• enter data,
• navigate through a spreadsheet,
• create formulas to solve problems,
• create charts and graphs,
• understand relative vs absolute references,
• import and export data,
• implement VLOOKUP,
• use pivot tables,
• split and concatenate text,
• and more.

Source: [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1906/" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17.6px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; color: var(--gray90); text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer; word-break: break-word;)

While learning Excel, you will create the following six projects:

• Payroll
• Gradebook
• Decision Factors
• Sales Database
• Car Inventory
• Problem Solving Templates

Here is the free full-length Microsoft Excel course:

📺 Learn Microsoft Excel - Full 3-hour Video Course on YouTube.

Free Excel Courses and Tutorials

And here are a lot of other free Excel courses and tutorials you can use to master Excel. These answer some of the most widely-asked questions about Excel.

• Word Count in Excel – How to Check the Number of Words
• AutoSum Excel – How to Add Numbers with the Sum Formula
• Auto-Numbering in Excel – How to Number Cells Automatically
• VLOOKUP Example – How to Do VLOOKUP in Excel

And here are some Excel programming tutorials, if you want to combine Python and other programming languages with spreadsheets to automate even more of your work.

• How to create, read, update and search through Excel files using Python
• Excel VBA Tutorial – How to Write Code in a Spreadsheet Using Visual Basic
• How to Remove Duplicates in Excel – Delete Duplicate Rows with a Few Clicks
• How to Create Auto-Updating Excel Spreadsheets of Stock Market Data with Python, AWS, and IEX Cloud
• How to Build an Excellent Stripe Integration with Node.js: 4 Best Practices and Examples
• How to Generate an Excel Report in a Spring Boot REST API with Apache POI and Kotlin

Plus: seven cheap and simple things you can do to meet your employees’ need for professional development

Train, but not in the way you’d expect

An interesting issue came up in a call last week with Lorraine, one of the CEOs I coach. A promising employee at her company had announced that he was leaving to join a strategy consultancy — not for the pay or the stability, but for the career development. The team member thought the consultancy would build his career more.

“Should I push back?”, Lorraine asked me. “I don’t think career development is something people should expect in a startup.”

You can see Lorraine’s point. Many of the benefits that come with a job at a big company — like long, structured training programs or big budgets to fly off to interesting conferences a few times a year — are expensive. And they’re things that startups that are losing money can’t afford. You can’t ask for that and also expect to become a millionaire from your stock options if the job works out.

So this presents Lorraine with a dilemma. Should she increase her company’s costs, when I already have a limited runway? Or should she resign herself to losing good people who want career development that she can’t provide?

Everyone who thinks about their own future wants to learn new skills and to get more senior jobs in the future. But remember, mature companies have both scale and profitability. It’s much cheaper for them per head to build a structured training program. They can afford to wait longer for the returns. Investors in a startup that may not be around in two years have to think shorter term. But even really confident startups have a little incentive to sink cash into training in their early months.

The route to professional growth in startups is different from the route in big companies

To run the numbers, think about a startup that raises its first finance from friends and family at a valuation of $2m. Spending $20,000 on training promising employees will cost 1% of the company’s value. But if this cost can be put off until the business raises a seed round a year later, at a valuation of $10m, then the training cost will fall to one-fifth of a percent. And if it can be put off until a Series A two years later, when the business is worth $40m, then the cost will be only one-twentieth of a percent of the company’s value. No wonder startup CEOs want to delay spending, no matter how strongly they believe in training and professional development.

Turn your lack of hierarchy into an advantage

But there’s a catch in the lavish programs offered by big business. More training comes with more structure. They’re often also more rigid and hierarchical. If you’re a young and ambitious new employee, good luck debating a business decision with a partner who has been at the organization ten years. In startups, by contrast, many good founder-CEOs follow Paul Saffo’s principle of ‘strong opinions, weakly held.’ They’re willing to consider new ways of doing things, even if those new ways come from someone who joined last week.

Startups have another advantage, too. In a successful venture-backed business, the size of the team can double or triple within a year or two. Then do the same again two years later. Since hiring is so hard, a known insider with proven ambition and determination can have a big advantage.

This presents a choice for employees. For people who think they need to learn a defined body of expertise — especially stuff that requires long, continuous work with an experienced practitioner — a mature company has the advantage. But for those who are open to more opportunistic career development — training on the job, picking up stuff as they go, learning by doing, and simply volunteering for projects — then a startup may have an advantage.

So if you’re a startup CEO like Lorraine, then start by explaining this to everyone you hire before they join. And if an existing employee complains about the career development you offer, then have an honest chat. Help them figure out whether they’ll be happy and fulfilled in this structure. If not, you should put this down to a hiring mistake, and make a mental note to be more upfront in future recruiting.

Make sure both sides understand the bargain that’s being struck

But there’s also stuff you can do, without loading costs on to the business, to make career development less random, more structured, and more helpful to the team. A good start is that employees take the lead on their own career development, not the HR department. If they want the company to invest money in their future, they need to start investing their own time first. They can identify and take advantage of opportunities that are free, like reading blogs, watching TED talks, taking online courses — and proving that they’re more valuable to the business as a result. This gives a company a good reason to think that investing more in them will produce great returns.

So if you’re the CEO of a startup, what can you do to encourage and support this? Here are six approaches that I’ve seen succeed in different companies.

1. Make professional development part of the evaluation process.

Ask people to report what they’re doing outside work to develop their skills. Give recognition and reward to the strongly positive signal of people investing in themselves. When employees know they’re going to be asked about this, they magically start noticing opportunities that might otherwise have floated by.

2. Don’t just evaluate employees’ self-managed professional development.

Support it, too. Make it part of one-on-ones. Use your experience and knowledge to give feedback on which topics people work on, and which content in those areas.

3. Provide low-cost tools with company resources.

Even startups on a shoestring can afford books. Rather than just declare open season and let people buy whatever they want — often a recipe for a shelf full of shiny titles that never get read — invite people to ask others what they’ve found most useful, and buy the books that are upvoted most.

4. Encourage people to share what they’ve learned.

Surgeons have a phrase for it: ‘see one, do one, teach one.’ When someone has just finished studying something, they’re in a great position to give a 30-minute presentation on it to colleagues. This can become a regular fixture, where the company provides the tools and the drinks, and the team provides the learning.

5. Create mentoring relationships inside the company.

There are often things that more experienced people can do in their sleep that newer hires can benefit hugely from observing. To avoid adding a big burden to employees who are already busy, be realistic about how much time you can reasonably ask them to spend on helping others. Start by halving it.

6. Use SAAS platforms for education.

There’s an amazing range of online content available for hundreds of dollars, compared with the thousands of dollars the same content used to cost when taught in offsite training seminars. Learning for twelve minutes a day isn’t just less disruptive than disappearing for a week a year to take a full-time course; it can also produce better learning.

7. Encourage team members to reach out beyond the company to learn.

It’s not just CEOs that benefit from coaching. Almost everyone in the company — sales and marketing, product, engineering, finance — can learn a lot from other people in the industry. As CEO, you can prompt people to identify outsiders they can learn from, and help them figure out how to make the relationship work.

Wrapping up

You may fear that none of these seven suggestions can match what might be offered by McKinsey, Procter & Gamble, or Goldman, Sachs. And you’d be right. But if you spend a couple of hours putting them together, they can combine into a career development program that isn’t expensive but delivers real learning and real personal growth. And that’s something you can tell people about during the hiring process. It’s also something that will draw in talented employees with strong self-motivation and keenness to learn.

About me

I’m Tim, and I run a seed fund out of London that invests in SAAS, platforms, marketplaces, and tools. I’ve backed 50 companies and sat on 19 boards, and I also coach Series A and B CEOs introduced by VC firms in Europe, America, and Asia. Previously, I founded a startup and took it to an IPO on the NASDAQ, and before that worked for The Economist and the Financial Times.

About this publication

Lessons From Startup CEOs is a series of blog posts covering nine of the most important skills I’ve seen in founders who are most successful in scaling their companies. If you’d like to read more of them, please follow.