With younger generations clamoring for workplace learning opportunities, and L&D budgets expanding in the wake of the pandemic, most businesses have a corporate training program in place. But how do you know if the training is effective? Tracking employee progress and updating the training as needed is a step many companies skip, when, in fact, evaluation is a crucial step to success. Especially with so many teams working remotely, continuously assessing how things are going and course correcting when needed can help create a thriving culture of learning.
Effective evaluation is easier said than done, however. In a 2014 McKinsey survey, lack of credible metrics was listed by executives as one of the biggest obstacles to successful training programs, and nearly 20% said that their organization did not even attempt to measure the impact of such initiatives.
While assessing training programs is challenging, it is not impossible. And it is easier with the right partnerships and tools in place.
Following are three ways to create robust training that is adaptable and measurable, giving managers a better idea of what they are getting back from their investment.
1. Create Training With Long Term Goals
The options for employee training are endless. You can outsource the design, or make training modules yourself. Another option is to use workplace collaboration tools. Video conferencing, like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, can provide a more personal option, and also allow you to provide direct feedback while answering any questions. Social collaboration tools are another great solution to keep everyone on the same page in a quick, low-stress way. The downside to these options is that they can seem too casual, and may not be easy to track or implement updates.
Learning management software (LMS) allows you to make employee training with personalized training modules customized to your training wants. Using software streamlines the process and takes away some of the stress and time commitment of creating your own training.
A well-built LMS also comes with immersive tools that can gather, track and evaluate data from each learning session. Using the right software from the outset helps ensure that the courses you build have the capabilities you need to track their success on the back end.
2. Choose the Right Evaluation Methods
There are a number of different ways to evaluate training programs. You can manually track each quiz and test, or watch applicable work products to see if the training is being applied. If you create your training using workplace collaboration, then either of these manual tracking methods are a great starting point.
While manually tracking is one option, there are other ways to evaluate the progress. A good LMS provides organizations with a single space to house training modules, quizzes and evaluation data. When you have your employees complete the training using the LMS, you can track their progress, evaluate, and update the training in the platform to create a streamlined, personalized training program.
In recent years, xAPI data has become another viable evaluation tool within an LMS. The management tool uses the programming interface to record keystrokes and mouse clicks to learn about behavior. With this data, businesses can find out how their employees are using the training, what programs they leave to begin training, the minutes they spend on each page, and other helpful analytics.
3. Keep Your Training Updated
The best way to ensure the effectiveness of your training is to keep it current. Based on your evaluations, are there sections that don’t seem as valuable or impactful as you would like? If you have problem areas in your training, take some time to adjust the messaging.
This is another area where an LMS can make your life easier. If you create the training yourself, it can be time-consuming, expensive, and hard to keep updated. Remember all those old, cheesy training videos you watched in the 2000s? Those videos were made, in many cases, more than ten years prior, but, since they were so expensive to produce, nobody bothered updating them. You don’t want your training program to follow the same path. Instead, you can maximize the LMS program by breaking training into smaller modules that can be updated, often with assets available right there in the LMS, on an as-needed basis.
Conclusion
Building an effective employee training program is crucial to your employees’ success, but the success doesn’t happen by itself. Take the time necessary to evaluate your training, using an LMS can help streamline the process to make it easier and faster. With the right training, the right evaluation tools, and the right commitment to a current program, you will have a more engaged workforce––and the data to back it up––before you know it.
Request a demo of our LMS/LXP to see easy it could be to build your employee training program.
