Virtually every element of a business—from marketing tactics to job costs to inventory—is tracked on a micro scale. Businesses analyze this data for opportunities to make small changes that can yield big wins over time.
But there’s one key area that many businesses fail to track: Learning and development. Many training programs are years old and don’t make a meaningful difference in business growth. Others are generic modules that were never tailored to meet the needs of the business. But without strong metrics to demonstrate which learning initiatives need to be updated or replaced, many businesses keep recycling the same programs over and over, wasting company money and employee time.
When you start tracking the value of your training programs with the same care and detail as your other business areas, you can expect several major benefits to your business.
Maximize your L&D budget by identifying your best training programs—and removing the bad ones.
Studies show that only 25% of workplace training programs actually benefit the business. While that number isn’t necessarily surprising—most of us have sat through at least one comically bad workplace training—it’s not exactly uplifting, either. Ineffective training programs are a waste of financial resources and your employees’ time, and they’re not great for morale.
You can eliminate these pointless programs by tracking the effectiveness of all your learning initiatives. The right training tool will help you measure retention, on-the-job application, and other important metrics determining the value of your learning and development modules. You can use that data to identify which initiatives are really working, which ones need some adjustments, and which ones you can simply bid farewell.
With so many people working from home, tracking learning ROI is critical.
When your entire staff was working in the office, it might have been easier to gather anecdotal evidence on how effective your training programs are. Between watercooler chatter and thoughts shared between meetings, you’d likely hear enough feedback to get a sense of whether your team finds the training valuable.
But many companies have pivoted to hybrid or remote work. There are a lot of benefits to remote workspaces, but it can be a little more challenging to gather subjective feedback on your training programs.
The solution is a robust dashboard for measuring learning ROI. If you’re tracking key metrics, you can back up what you hear from your team with hard data, regardless of your workplace setup.
Boost leadership buy-in by tracking and proving learning ROI.
While it may be easy for you to see the great results of your training programs on a day-to-day basis, that value is less visible to the C-suite and other leaders. They may not be able to understand—or believe in—the value of your learning initiatives without data to prove it. And since leadership usually has the final say on funding allocations, you might find yourself without an L&D budget if you can’t communicate the value of your training plan.
With the right learning ROI tracking tool, you can present hard numbers on how your L&D initiatives benefit the company. You can demonstrate:
- Areas in which your team is faster, better, and more effective thanks to your training modules.
- How you used your tracking dashboard to identify knowledge gaps and then implemented additional training to solve it.
- How you plan to make your program even better next year based on your team’s current performance.
This will make it much easier for data-driven leaders to understand the importance of training, so they’ll be more willing to meet your budget requests.
Tracking learning effectiveness helps you evolve and improve learning over time.
If we've learned anything in the last two years, it's that we must be agile in our business practices. In a matter of weeks many organizations packed up and moved to remote work. This required training managers to quickly assess their strategy and figure out how to make distance learning a workable option.
By tracking your learning effectiveness, it allows you to make quick pivots when something is and isn't working, it allows you to understand where more resources are needed and where you're wasting time/budget. Being able to forecast and respond to the needs of your organization is critical.
What should I be measuring?
In the past, learning has been siloed and disconnected from other business lines; in order to keep your funding and prove impact it's time to reach across the aisle and gather data that shows that learning can produce positive business results. Meet with other business partners and find out what they're measuring, their KPIs, and how they collect that data. This will help you develop your own set of KPIs that can be mapped across the organization to measure success.
Here are a few KPIs to get you started:
- Time to proficiency
- Knowledge and skill retention
- Transfer of training
- Impact on organizational performance metrics
- Employee engagement in learning initiatives
- Net promoter score
- Stakeholder satisfaction
The #1 tool for measuring the effectiveness of your training programs
So here’s the real question: How do you objectively measure the power of your learning and training programs? Learning and training are very subjective, and it can be difficult to assess them with hard data if you’re not sure where to start.
Trivie has designed a robust and effective checklist tool you can use to set goals and KPIs for your training programs. The checklist, which is one of our most popular resources, will suggest different metrics for you measure, so you can track what’s most important to you and your business. You can get started today—for free.
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