Why Measuring Learning Effectiveness is Important in 2021

Who would have thought 2020 would wind up being such a mess! Organizations were faced with unprecedented business challenges that they were not remotely prepared for. In a matter of a few days, the entire workforce was compelled to shift from their physical offices to working from home. Come 2021,the scenario is still the same and it’s safe to say this way of working is hereto stay for the long haul. From the learning and development (L&D) perspective, teams had to quickly figure out ways to realign their corporate training programs to match up to the renewed learning needs given that the remote learning environment was in play. L&D teams had to adopt new modalities of the training model. This entailed hybrid learning ways and of course embracing virtual online sessions on a large scale. For many organizations this meant ramping up their investments in their training programs.

While some organizations fast-tracked signing-off on budgets for learning and development, other organizations made the change to spending on new solutions and learning technology cautiously. In either case, the shift meant increasing the investment in online training tools such as content authoring solutions, Learning Management Systems (LMS), social learning tools, and training content development. Research has shown that companies investing heavily in L&D in a pre-pandemic era have now allocated even more money on their training initiatives.

However, here’s the catch. Once you decide to double your investments in new virtual learning technologies, you need to be accountable to show the effectiveness of the training. You need to quantify the learning outcomes. What this means is, you will be responsible to present to the stakeholders the return on investment of your increased L&D budget. In order for that to happen, you need to show hard proof to justify the investment in L&D. You need to cement your case with tangible metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and build a vote of confidence that the time, efforts, and money spent on new training methods will have a positive impact on the learners. In short, your learners need to retain the information and demonstrate their learning on the job to deal with real-life work challenges. 

Why is it Critical to Measure Training Effectiveness?

Measuring the effectiveness of your training helps you with actionable insights to increase the effectiveness of training. How so? Here are some pointers.

Reduced time on manual tasks:

When your learning platform has built-in assessments, questionnaires, content and automated reporting dashboards, you end up saving up time spent to do these activities manually.

Actionable Business Insights:

‍On measuring the training effectiveness, you are able to quantity and justify the organization's investment in online training solutions. L&D then becomes a strategic function in the business ecosystem. With data-driven decisions, L&D can have a positive impact on the employees and in turn the overall business.

Elevated Learner Engagement:

‍Data acquired from measuring the training effectiveness acts as a good starting point for the L&D teams to find the gaps in training and engage the learners in the right way.

In Conclusion

If you haven't already adopted the online modes of training, it's time you jump onto the wagon to do so as remote work becomes the new normal. Having said that, with new investments, you will need to constantly measure the impact of training to show the ROI.