Organizational competitiveness depends on learning agility of modern workforce. 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.

Source: https://www.iiht.com/blog/how-to-measure-the-impact-of-your-learning-and-development-program/