Learning and development teams spend many hours developing training courses for employees. But without a sufficient feedback loop, questions are raised: is this training effective? Do employees find it useful? Are we properly supporting organizational goals and improving performance Without properly set up training analytics, it can be anyone’s guess as to whether the carefully curated training program is effective.
So, whether you have analytics set up through your LMS, LEP or use some other way to measure training course performance, here are X metrics that you need to pay attention to:
1.Training Intake
Gathering and interpreting training intake data helps L&D to close skills gaps, understand the needs and demand for training in the organization, and better analyze existing resources. By understanding some of the data you can gather right from the training request phase, you can make better informed decisions about how to prioritize requests and understand the training needs amongst employees and management.
Some examples of training intake metrics to start measuring include:
- the volume of training requests your L&D department receives,
- the acceptance/rejection rate of training requests, and
- the department and topic of each request.
Consequently, trends will emerge that can help you align new course design to training demand and organizational performance.
The first step to tracking training intake metrics is creating standardized training request forms. Then, you can consistently collect data on the metrics you want to track.
2. Participation Rates
Tracking participation rates can tell you a lot about employees’ overall engagement with your training program. If your training portal access rates are low, you may need to further promote learning experiences to the workforce.
Once a course is designed and deployed, you can also track participation rates at the course level. Sometimes everything has been done to effectively market the course to employees and participation rates are still low. If so, it’s time to assess whether your course is addressing a need. Or, it may not be geared towards the right existing knowledge levels.
3. Completion Rates
Once your learners are inside the course, it’s time to determine whether the content is creating a compelling learning experience. For critical courses such as compliance training, you may need to go as granular as tracking engagement with individual pieces of content. Are learners watching the full video before clicking through to the assessment phase? Can you track screen rolls to see what they are skipping past and what they are spending time on?
If you are losing learners before course completion, tracking the point at which they exit the course can help to identify the problem. It may only require working on a single piece of content within the course rather than redesigning the whole course.
4. Pass Rate
Another metric that can help you assess course design is the pass rate. Your learners may be consuming course content and completing the course but falling down at the assessment phase. The reason for this may be that:
- The course content is not effectively transmitting the required information
- The assessment piece does not align with the learning objective and is too difficult for the knowledge level learners acquire in the course
- Learners do not have the prerequisite knowledge for the course difficulty level
Low pass rates may indicate the need to further personalize the learning path to ensure the right employees are accessing the right courses. Or it may lead to a re-evaluation of the assessment piece within an individual course that has low pass rates.
5. Devices Used
Paying attention to learning preferences is vital to preserving engagement rates amongst learners. Employees today want on-demand training that they can access in the time of need. Not only that, learners want to be able to access training on the go, just like they do with other content.
By analyzing the devices your learners use to access training, you can make sure that your content is optimized for mobile and that your learning experiences are designed with mobile usage in mind.
6. Ongoing Skills Assessments
One of the best ways to track the true impact of your training program is on the ground through the performance of employees themselves. By creating specific learning paths and skills profiles, you can track employees’ progress through those learning paths and knowledge levels to see if training is effective.
7. Tie Learning Metrics to Business Goals
The measurement of training performance today needs to go beyond engagement rates and tie training courses to overall organizational performance. L&D can do this by coordinating with other departments to identify key performance indicators and align training course metrics to those KPIs.
These cross-departmental analytics can help to showcase the contribution of L&D to business performance.
Want to see how to gain valuable insights from training intake data? Download this free ebook!
