Does LXP Actually Mean Anything?

HR professionals struggle to keep up to date with their field and that is triply true for HR tech professionals. There are always new features, new products, and new categories to learn about. The challenge for the HR pro is to decide which new things are significant.

One of the biggest recent changes is that the venerable term LMS (Learning Management System) is being challenged by the term LXP (Learning Experience Platform). Is this significant? What does LXP even mean?

LXP is meant to be different from LMS by virtue of these features:

More flexible handling of content
Better ability to search or get recommendations for content
Better ability to track the user experience
Better analytics

However, if you look at who the LXP vendors are, it’s companies like Saba, Docebo, and SAP LITMOS. You’ll notice that these are the familiar LMS vendors. It’s not really a new category, it’s just a set of improved features you can expect an advanced LMS to have. Have the capabilities advanced enough that we need a new term? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

What’s interesting

When you are new to a field it’s really exciting to learn what all the acronyms mean. When you’ve got more experience, it gets tiresome when acronyms are just a new spin on an existing product. LXS fits somewhere between “just a marketing phrase” and a signal that the product has changed enough that it justifies renaming it.

What’s really important

It’s true that LMS’s have evolved a great deal over the past decade. If you’ve not been following the world of learning software, then you’ll have a poor sense of what they can do now. If the term LXP inspires you to update your knowledge of learning technology, then that’s not such a bad thing.