The world is transforming at lightning speed with rapidly emerging technologies and customer preferences. Organizations have to survive this onslaught, grow and thrive to be competitive. And so high-performing learning and development (L&D) teams are investing in upskilling and reskilling employees, through rapid eLearning solutions.
And here comes the big question: Is training effective and worth the investment? Let’s take a look at how L&D can measure the impact of training programs.
Upskilling and reskilling programs need to improve employee performance and help them contribute to the bottom line.
5 Tips to Measure Training’s Effectiveness
1. Include Assessments in Online Training
Assessments are an integral part of any training. In classroom training, it is easy for the trainer to gauge learners’ participation by asking questions or through group activities. Trainers can also change the pace of delivery, and learners have the luxury of having their doubts clarified immediately.
However, in online training, this becomes a little challenging: Other than virtual instructor-led training (VILT), online learning formats (such as eLearning and microlearning) don’t involve trainers. Hence, assessments play a crucial role in evaluating learners’ understanding of the content.
Evaluation of learners’ performance through assessments is a clear indication of the success of your online training program. If the majority of learners struggle to clear the summative assessment, you can reevaluate the complexity of the content and work on simplifying the training modules.
On the other hand, if most learners complete the assessments much earlier than the designated time and score well, you can think of adding a few challenging questions that allow learners to use their critical thinking abilities.
Here are a few ways you can include engaging assessments in various online training formats:
Virtual instructor-led training (VILT): Quick polls or quizzes for pulse checks are good to test understanding. The trainer can also conduct breakout room activities to measure learning outcomes on core concepts. Learners can also be asked to answer worksheets after each learning module.
eLearning: eLearning modules can include formative and summative assessments that help assess learning. You can include question formats such as fill-in-the-blanks, drag-and-drop and multiple-choice questions and match-the-following to elicit responses pertaining to the eLearning modules.
Microlearning: Microlearning is one of the most popular online training formats. Quizzes, games and scenarios are helpful in gauging learners’ understanding of the delivered content.
2. Check Learners’ Ability to Apply Learning at Work
To check whether your online training was successful in imparting the desired information or teaching the required skills, observe your employees at work. Are they able to resolve their daily work challenges and get the work done by themselves or do they still need assistance? Are they able to finish their tasks faster, while ensuring quality? Supervisors can offer valuable insights here, thereby helping measure the effect of your skills training programs.
For instance, if your sales reps can close deals faster, or if the customer care team records fewer escalations, your negotiation skills courses must be doing the trick! While other factors such as team morale and support from the boss do weigh in, observing these results over a large group of learners will help you assess the effectiveness of your online training programs.
3. Leverage the Power of Learning Analytics
When it comes to imparting seamless online training, a learning management system (LMS) is something you can’t overlook. An LMS will help your organization host, manage, deliver and track your online training courses, be it VILT, eLearning or microlearning, videos and more.
The LMS also supports you with learning analytics that offer insightful reports to evaluate the effectiveness of your online training programs. You can generate reports to track learners’ progress for each course and keep an eye on the course completion rates.
These reports can provide you with deeper insights into learner behavior and you can identify scope for improving courses. For example, if you find a majority of learners skipping a particular slide, you can reevaluate the slide’s complexity; if it proves too complex, you can simplify the presentation using graphics or an explanatory video.
4. Don’t Ignore Learner Feedback
Ask your learners how they find the training — after all, you are conducting the training for their benefit. Sometimes, while designing and developing online training courses, we fail to step into the shoes of the learners. It pays to listen to their side of the story.
Learning analytics can help you collect relevant data regarding employee satisfaction too. It can provide you with reports that entail course completion rates, the number of learners taking a particular course and the number of learners leaving midway. This can help you evaluate and revise your online training courses.
For instance, if you find most of the learners leaving a course midway, you may wish to analyze the engagement factor of the course and try including more interactivity to keep your learners engaged.
You can also conduct surveys through questionnaires or interview learners to understand what they think about the training. Remember, employee satisfaction is key to the success of your training program and hence requires attention.
5. Calculate Online Training ROI
The first question that comes to mind when we plan to invest in training is whether it would deliver a positive return on investment (ROI). And rightly so: ROI is an indispensable parameter to measure online training’s effectiveness, considering the investment in terms of cost, time and effort.
The success of your online training program is the cost-to-performance ratio, so you need to list your costs against the benefits. If the results outweigh the cost of designing and developing the online training courses and other resources, you pass the test.
If the results don’t outweigh the cost of designing and developing training, here’s what you can do:
- Check your desired organizational goals.
- Identify performance gaps.
- Align your learning objectives to cover the performance gaps.
Upskilling and reskilling employees can’t be ignored anymore. In fact, it ranks third among the top 10 L&D program areas of 2023, according to the 2023 Workplace Learning Report by LinkedIn Learning.
And with organizations using videos, virtual tours and workshops, microlearning, gamified courses and more to make training appealing to today’s learners, it is important for learning leaders to close the loop and measure the impact of their training.
It’s not just important to measure your learners’ performance but also to ensure your training programs are training employees on the right skills, the right way!
