Organizational competitiveness depends on learning agility of modern workforces. As technology adoption rate is increasing, businesses require new skill sets to cut through the intense competition. L&D initiatives employed to up-skill or re-skill employees measure the quality of the efforts but often miss out on the value they add to the business results.
Also in a situation where talent management is constrained with time, intent, and budget, the unclear value-add of L&D to business can stop organizations from investing in such programs. These factors make it important for L&D professionals to measure and show the impact of L&D programs.
Learning Elements You Must Measure
With the huge amount of learner data flowing in, the mindset of a data-driven training outcome is the need today. The team needs to identify how learner’s data can change outcomes at individual levels. Here are some of the key metrics to think through:
- Skill attained:This training evaluation approach revolves around measuring knowledge levels, both pre-learning and post-learning. Evaluate skill attainment in simultaneity with the job role and the concepts a learner needs to understand well.
- Skill applied:Without real-world application learning programs do not serve the purpose. So, it is important to understand the extent your learners are applying the concepts with hands-on labs.
- Behavioural skills:It is important to know if your employees are familiar and aligned with the organizational values or interpersonal skills required to be successful in a particular role. Behavioural skills should be measured on both individual and team levels.
- Goal attained:L&D outcomes are closely related to the immediate goals of each learner, which includes the role-based performance goals set for them. So it is important to intricately tie L&D outcomes in with the employee performance management process.
The Need For Modern Evaluation Tools
Traditional models for evaluating training effectiveness are of minimal help in assessing responses, knowledge, behaviour, and outcomes of training. These models fail when it comes to measuring outcomes in line with business requirements.
Moreover, L&D with the addition of different content delivery methods like blended mode, mobile, and engagement tools like gamification, social collaboration and so on, require a unique blend of quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure outcomes. So the standard evaluations techniques like feedbacks, psychometric assessments cease to be effective on a larger scale.
Quantifying Outcomes In Business Terms
The four-step assessment discussed above has helped enterprises arrive at an overview of their L&D outcomes. Moreover, measuring the ‘goals attained’ by employees/learners require an extensive analysis at the overall business level.
The effective measurement of both quantitative and qualitative aspects of L&D is the necessary step to generate buy-in with the CXO suite.
Here is what L&D professionals look out for:
- Development Productivity:
Developer training should result in enhanced quality, a higher volume of completed tasks and an understanding of priority levels of issues.
Conduct a pre-training and post-training analysis of employees’ productivity and their workloads to understand whether the training has improved their deliverability.
- Cost reductions:
One of the important objectives of L&D is to increase workforce efficiency, thereby enabling cost savings. For example, employees often come up with cost-effective projects when trained for seeking similar outcomes while training.
So it is important to monitor the relationship between technical skill taught, the behavioural response by the learner and positive outcomes in the projects.
- Employee retention:
Apart from improving business outcomes, L&D aids businesses by imparting employee stickiness.
Utilising various right engagement tool, L&D reduces recruitment efforts and costs with improved retention levels. Any fluctuations in employee retention data help enterprises optimise their L&D strategy.
Embrace L&D Analytics
Evaluating the L&D outcomes and their effectiveness depends on these analytical factors. This calls for a continuous learning evaluation process and the use of the latest evaluation systems.
Evaluation of learners done on the basis of real-time data and recommended actionable shape learning outcomes that maximise the value of L&D strategies.
Conclusion
L&D is to build individual and organizational capability and help navigate the business conundrums of today and tomorrow. It also serves as an engagement and retention tool, by offering career advancement opportunities.
Achieving these goals requires the devising an effective and optimised L&D strategy. Right from identifying the training needs to implementation and to measuring effectiveness, each stage of L&D strategy must be revisited and revised as per need.
These revisions help L&D professionals to create an observable impact on the knowledge, skills-sets, and attitudes while aligning talent with the organizational needs.
Elevating Learning And Development With Curated Learning Experience
Technologies like VR and AR, automation, and AI has brought disruption to our expectations for engaging, and experience-based learning.
Workforce agility is congenitally linked to learning and the way enterprises approach L&D has a lot of impact on business outcomes. Even with large enterprises prioritizing continuous learning and development for employees, it proves rather tough to design and implement outcome-based learning programs.
Aspect like employees scattered worldwide, employees working from home, and employee turnover it seems strenuous to design learning paths that fit and caters to each individual and drive positive results.
Here are the 5 must-have features of a successful L&D program.
Accessibility
As the use of technology at workplaces brings complexities for employees and the process has become dynamic, L&D needs to provide access to learning resources “anytime, anywhere, on any device.”
Offering accessibility this versatile has its challenges, but it’s worth it as digital learners value it the most. As per the modern leaners, the ease of access and ease of consumability remains the most important factors in enterprise learning programs.
Programs designed with considerations of pro and cons of multiple devices is key to making learning easier to digest.
Micro learning is also an important aspect of an accessible learning program. Instructors or instructional designers working on the resources won’t require to tweak or update the entire course/video if the resource is divided into smaller pieces.
Immersive Learning Technologies
The current excitement around AR/VR is centred on gaming, but these technologies will have a larger, lasting impact on the L&D.
Virtual labs and simulations are replacing traditional practice sessions and assessments with learning experience platforms where the skills required are taught and practised in simulated environments.
Virtual labs have allowed L&D leaders to add balance in programs with aspects of learning by doing. Customization in these simulations helps learners extend their learning into newer technologies and processes just at the nick of the time.
Sustainment And Retention
A learning program without a plan for application or reflection on a real-world scenario is incomplete. Whether you have a custom-designed or off-the-shelf learning program the impact of training programs can’t be measured if skills are not validated and reinforced.
The real change takes place when the teams work on live projects and use their learnings into practice. The goal of learning programs should be to sustain learning and increase retention. Tools like videos, hands-on labs, resource easy to consume, and social learning leads the way to higher engagement among learners. These tools support teams and L&D outcomes as learners put their learning into practice.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence has been used to deliver personalized learning and measuring the effectiveness of learning deliveries.
AI enabled learning management systems provides personalized recommendations that facilitate curated learning paths. These recommendations help us create learning environments which are more engaging and rewarding for your learners.
The more significant impact of AI is around measuring the effectiveness of programs. A well-designed curriculum, perfect execution by instructors, a great learning experience may not be all your organisation needs.
If your employees are not agile, you stand a chance to value and market share. AI is a cost-effective and time-saving tool to manage the quality of training with measured analytics.
Automation
Chatbots have been a huge success when it comes to 24*7 support. This success can be repeated if chatbots are used to distribute your training at learners’ fingertips.
As bots help its users and take over repetitive, process-oriented tasks, they can be used as a better engaging tool. Automation used to handle technical and process-driven tasks will help L&D leaders spend more time on value-added takes which require creative and objective thought.
Enterprises embracing automation need to work in proximity with L&D to verse employees to work with new tools and technologies.
The role of L&D is going to shift towards being more creative and objective as the process moves towards automation. Moving forward, L&D will need to ensure design and delivery for more complex learning requirements in organisations. This seems to be an amazing opportunity for Instructional Designers and Instructors.
At IIHT Enterprise Learning Solutions, we enable workforce transformation with rich learning experiences. Our deep expertise and 25+ years of experience in corporate training enable us to create training programs that deliver highly engaging, immersive learning experiences that ensure learning agility.
With over 3000+ courses to choose from and training delivery models that range from ILT, VILT, Self-Paced Learning to Hybrid Learning, IIHT offers customized training solutions that meet your organizations learning objectives.