As per CIPD, only 16% of companies measure the effectiveness of their training programs, and a mere 14% study the impact their L&D initiatives have on the business. This lack of evaluation not only leads to the wastage of company resources but also restricts growth. It is imperative to ensure that your L&D initiatives provide your company with the desired value.
Why You Need To Measure Training Effectiveness
- Measure business impact – It is essential to validate the investment you have made in your L&D initiatives. Measuring the effectiveness of your training programs will help you establish the returns you are getting on your investments.
- Align L&D with corporate strategy – Measuring how effective your training program is will help in aligning your L&D initiatives with your corporate strategy. It will also help forecast the fulfillment of your company goals.
- Increase learner engagement – Tracking the effectiveness of your training programs will enable you to ensure a better, richer, and faster learning experience for your employees.
- Facilitate data-backed decisions – With insights into qualitative and quantitative data, you will not only make better decisions but also develop competent learning solutions.
How To Measure Training Effectiveness
Here are a few of the best examples of L&D KPIs:
Training Attendance
Tracking attendance for each course is an effective learning and development KPI to measure training effectiveness. Keep a track of sign-ups or attendees at the start of every course and compare it weekly with the number of attendees in sessions as the course progresses. This will help you determine how interested your learners are in taking up courses and enable you to measure the effectiveness of each course. If the attendance is dropping with the progression of a course, it signifies that the learners are losing interest. You can also track the completion rate to better understand which courses are being abandoned and send nudges accordingly.
Time-To-Proficiency
Time taken by an employee to produce results after successfully completing a course is one of the most important training analytics metrics. The faster your employees are able to implement their learnings, the more efficient their work performance will be. It is imperative to shorten the learning curve of your employees and tracking time-to-proficiency will provide you with the required insights.
If your employees are unable to implement their learnings, there could be two reasons why-
- The structure of your organization is stagnant: In this scenario, you must conduct a productivity and efficiency audit to ascertain the blockages. Once you have a supportive structure in place, track how well your employees’ learnings are being implemented. If the problem still persists, the course could be a problem.
- The course is not adequate: In this case, your learning and development team should collaborate with concerned managers to audit the functional value of the course and make relevant changes to it.
Course Net Promoter Score
Taking a new spin on the net promoter score, which is ideally used for measuring consumer satisfaction, you can use it to measure the impact of your training initiatives. It is one of the best metrics to help you measure training effectiveness. You can start by creating a questionnaire for your learners that includes questions like:
- Would you recommend *training/course name* to your coworkers?
- How would you rate your training experience out of 5?
- Was the course relevant to your specific job roles?
- How helpful was the course for you on a scale of 5?
You can also include course-specific or role-specific questions to get a better view. Once you are done conducting the survey, check the course net promoter score. If the score is less than what you had expected, you must identify the pain points and work towards fixing them.
Stakeholder Perception
Stakeholder perception is closely related to employee performance and requires frequent communication between the L&D team and managers. It is not only important to measure employee performance but it is also vital to note if the stakeholders are satisfied. This form of qualitative feedback will allow you to understand if the employees are able to transfer the knowledge to their jobs and track how productive it is for the team and organization.
Test Results
Tests or quizzes are an essential part of the training process and form a critical core of learning and development KPIs. They help keep the learners engaged and ensure that the information learned is retained. By analyzing the test or quiz results of each course, you can mark average learner scores. These scores will help you determine the quality of content, how easy it is to grasp, the retention capability of your learners, and much more.
A higher average learner score is an indicator of successful training; however, if some of your courses do not have a good average learner score, you must re-evaluate the content and survey your learners to understand what falls short.
Application Test
Application test is not a common but highly recommended approach; it is one of the best KPIs to measure training effectiveness. This entails running simulations of lifelike scenarios that your employees will be faced with after successfully completing the training. Application tests allow you to gain insight into what percentage of the knowledge has been retained by your learners and how it is applied in real-life situations. You can also create a scorecard for each of the simulated scenarios to quantifiably ascertain training effectiveness.
Employee Engagement Levels
There are several analytical tools you can employ to measure employee engagement in your organization; however, tracking engagement for your learning initiatives might not be as quantitative. One of the best KPIs to measure training effectiveness includes tracking the engagement level of your employees by analyzing their reactions to certain training programs.
For example, your sales team has been assigned a cybersecurity course as part of your organization’s compliance training program. Now they know it is mandatory to take that course; however, are they looking forward to it? Have they been briefed about why it is important for them and how it will benefit them? If not, you will experience low levels of engagement. Whereas, if the team is informed and understands the relevance of the course, they are much more likely to engage.
Measuring the effectiveness of your L&D initiatives is as important as implementing them. If you are looking for a comprehensive solution that allows you to not only facilitate a seamless learning experience but also offers progress tracking, check out Auzmor Learn – an intuitive, robust and scalable LMS.
