Equally important to having versatile and rewarding training programs is understanding just how well these programs – and learners - are performing. Evaluating the data gives Chief Learning Officers and other learning & development professionals valuable insights into what courses works, what needs improvement, and precisely the return on investment (or ROI) that their training methods provide as a whole.
As the eternal adage states, knowledge is power, and analytics tools open up a greater wealth of in-depth data than ever before. However, more data equals more complexity – and complexity is a double-edged sword.
With all this in mind about how important it is to garner information about your employee training, let’s delve into some of the key generic metrics including how they function, and what they tell you.
Completion rates – for this figure, you can see how many people complete a module versus how many people begin, but never finish. This gives you a handle on the general level of engagement employees are putting into training. A low completion rate would be something to investigate and identify the root cause, whether that’s time constraints, workload pressures, or some other barrier.
Pass rates – this metric is as it says on the tin, and that is ‘how many employees taking this course actually pass?’. A crucial percentage to know, naturally, as it could indicate the depth of understanding employees have about their role and relates strongly to their real-world performance.
Training cost per employee – cost is, of course, important to any employer. To this end, working out the cost of training per employee (simply divide the total cost of all employees by number of workers) is a very useful figure to have, in order to compare against profitability as a whole.
Return on investment per course - this metric breaks down how much each course or module that you are running costs versus how much profit it generates through increased productivity and better on-the-job competency.
Training experience satisfaction – asking participants to give a numerical score or star rating to a training session can proffer an insight into how successful learners view the content to be. Low satisfaction scores might be a possible indication that content needs re-assessing or even an overhaul.
Of course, this is just a brief overlook at training metrics that are applicable to basically any business. The size, industry, and unique attributes of a company, as well as the analytics tools used mean that there is a rich vein of valuable data out there, ready to be mined.
But where can all this treasured data be sourced? One powerful method is through an LMS, or Learning Management System, which is a digital platform that can be used to host, manage, and monitor all of your education content in one place. Through use of an LMS, you can receive the data of how long users are interacting with content, watch-time stats for videos, scores on quizzes and tests, or whatever information you require.