When it comes to organizational training, one of the biggest challenges that leaders often face involves simply proving that the program is working as it's supposed to.
That is to say, many make the mistake of looking at employee training programs and other onboarding-related tasks through the lens of completion rate.
They think that 100% of the people who take the training program complete it, therefore it must be 100% effective.
But can every one of those employees hit the ground running and start immediately generating value when it comes to their new position?
Can all of them take whatever new set of skills they learned and use it to work better, faster, and more efficiently?
Is the quality of the work product that these people are capable of producing increasing relative to the time and money investment that the training program represented?
That's why you need a series of key performance indicators, not just one, to properly measure training ROI.
Of course, you also need to be able to communicate that value to stakeholders within the business.
Only then will they make the investments needed to allow the program to remain adaptable and agile to support your organization over the next decade.
What, you ask, will many of those stakeholders look for in order to determine the training ROI?
Completion rate, more often than not.
Nobody said ongoing training and development isn't ironic sometimes.
But hope is not lost.
By learning to effectively measure training ROI, you can begin to use that data to tell a compelling story about what your program is accomplishing and what is really going on.
At that point, you can frame the impact of your training programs to key stakeholders and continue to make meaningful changes that support your organization as it grows and evolves.
Getting to this point isn't necessarily difficult, but it does require you to keep a few key things in mind about demonstrating the true value of training along the way.
The Challenge of Measuring Training Impact
One of the major reasons why traditional metrics tend to fall short in this context is simple.
Just because someone has completed a quiz doesn't mean they understood the answers.
Just because someone filled out a satisfaction survey doesn't mean they are truly satisfied.
Anything based on "completion" is inherently flawed because it is only looking at one small part of a much larger story.
While completion and similar metrics are useful for tracking engagement and knowledge acquisition, they fail to capture the broader impact of training on performance, productivity, or business outcomes.
For example, a high test score doesn’t necessarily translate into improved work performance or increased sales.
You would need to dive deeper for that and paint a more robust picture of what people are learning and how it's all being applied in the real-world.
Equally important is the idea that measurements need to be aligned with business objectives in the first place.
The fact that someone is taking the knowledge they get in training and is using it to increase sales ultimately doesn't mean much if "increase sales" was never one of your core objectives to start with.
This applies to other fields, too.
In manufacturing, you might be tracking reduced workplace injuries or an increase in operational efficiency.
In healthcare, you might look closer at how patient satisfaction is improving over time, along with things like re-admission rates that should in theory be declining as training improves the skills of your workforce.
To effectively demonstrate the ROI of your training program, you need to align training outcomes with broader business goals.
This can include but is certainly not limited to ones like increased profitability, improved customer satisfaction, and enhanced employee retention.
This alignment ensures that training efforts are seen not just as a learning initiative, but as a strategic contributor to the company’s success.
Without this alignment, training might be viewed as a nice-to-have activity rather than a necessary investment.
Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Training
To make sure that you're tracking the right metrics in the first place, you need to select relevant key performance indicators (or KPIs) based on the type of training you're actually engaged in.
If yours is a technical skill training course, for example, you would want to focus on those KPIs that look at improvements in job competency.
You should also look at KPIs like error reduction and task completion speed.
Leadership development, on the other hand, requires a totally different approach.
Here, you would want to measure the leadership behaviors that matter most like team engagement, turnover rates within teams that are being led by the individuals in question, and more.
Compliance training requires yet another set of unique KPIs.
This would require you to track adherence rates, regulatory audits, incident reduction, and similar metrics.
The most important thing to take away from all this is that not all metrics are created equally.
Start with the objectives you're trying to achieve with the training and single out the KPIs that help you track that progress.
You'll also need to effectively balance leading and lagging indicators to tell the most complete story of how training is going on an ongoing basis.
Leading indicators are predictive metrics, such as training engagement or knowledge acquisition, that can forecast future success.
Lagging indicators, like sales growth or customer satisfaction, show the longer-term impact of training on business outcomes.
A balance between the two gives a full picture of both immediate learning and sustained impact.
Demonstrating Value to Stakeholders
In an effort to demonstrate the value of training to stakeholders, you need to dive beneath the data and the seemingly endless volume of numbers that you now have to contend with.
You just spent a lot of time tracking incredibly precise KPIs that mean a lot to you and your immediate colleagues.
Those same numbers might not be quite as compelling to key stakeholders and organizational leaders who have yet to be quite as involved in this process as you are.
Because of that, you need to work on turning those KPIs into a story.
Create compelling narratives around the training impact so that it's easier for stakeholders to connect those training outcomes with the larger business objectives that matter most to them.
Use qualitative and quantitative data to highlight the before-and-after scenario, illustrating improvements in performance or productivity directly linked to training.
Whenever possible, you'll also want to visualize data for maximum impact.
Again, what the numbers represent is critically important - but the numbers themselves aren't as captivating as you need.
Use graphs, charts, heat maps, or infographics to clearly communicate complex information in a way that is easy for virtually anyone to understand.
Dashboards that track training progress, completion rates, skill improvements, and business outcomes also allow stakeholders to easily assess the effectiveness of your program at a glance.
When putting together presentations that can help prove this value, understand that you also need to tailor your findings depending on exactly who it is you'll be talking to.
Different leaders will care about different aspects of ROI, after all.
Someone in the HR department might not care as much about increased sales as the head of the sales department.
You need to make things relevant to someone's position to show how training impacts them personally.
If you're speaking to high-level executives, for example, you would want to emphasize financial metrics, such as cost savings, productivity gains, and revenue growth.
If you were talking to managers, on the other hand, you would want to emphasize improvements in team performance, employee engagement, and retention.
You're not changing the numbers to fit the story.
You're simply choosing which part of the story will resonate with the person in front of you.
Implementing Continuous Improvement and Adaptation
To truly arrive at a training program that is meaningful beyond the simple metric of "pass/fail," you also need to embrace the idea of continuous improvement.
That is to say, the best training programs aren't unchanging.
They evolve as feedback and, more importantly, data enters the conversation.
By consistently measuring training outcomes and gathering feedback from participants, managers, and stakeholders, you can identify areas for improvement.
For example, if learners struggle with specific course modules, adjustments can be made to the content or delivery method to ensure better engagement and understanding.
The issue may not be with the material itself.
It's just that the material isn't being delivered in the right way for the audience in question.
Only through measurement will you be able to see that, and only by making an effort to understand that data will you be in a position to act on it and make a change.
That's another reason why demonstrating the true value of training is about a lot more than just proving you're "getting your money's worth" out of an investment.
An organization in the financial sector might track post-training performance metrics for people who participated in the program, for example.
Based on the actionable insight that they uncovered, they could adjust the program's content every quarter to stay aligned with the quickly evolving industry standards.
You also need to prioritize the ongoing collection of feedback as a part of this process.
Regular check-ins, surveys, and performance reviews will help you gather insights on the real-world impact of your training initiatives.
This information can then be used to refine content, modify delivery strategies, and ensure that future training is aligned with evolving business needs.
LX Studio's Approach to Measuring and Enhancing Training Impact
At LX Studio, our comprehensive impact measurement framework is designed to help relieve many of the challenges outlined above.
We're proud to offer the only results-focused, university-backed, proprietary learning strategy to help deliver evidence-based, transformational learning experiences whenever possible.
Our process is designed to be as straightforward as possible, bringing in a uniform visual language for describing learning that can be taught in a manner of minutes.
This goes a long way towards eliminating issues like miscommunication and an environment that makes collaboration far more difficult than it should be.
But ultimately, what makes us more than just another partner is our acknowledgment that both measuring and communicating the ROI of training programs is inherently complicated.
That's why we build this into our design from the beginning - it cannot be considered an afterthought.
We take the time to learn about every one of our partners in great detail, diving deep into your business goals and more.
That way, we can select the right KPIs and help create the feedback-driven process you need for continuous improvement.
We don't just want to help you measure.
We also aim to help you adapt and optimize your learning initiatives, all in the name of driving organizational success.
This is true regardless of the shape that success takes.
If you'd like to find out more information about going beyond completion rate to demonstrate the true value of workplace training, or if you have any additional questions about learning impact measurement that you'd like to discuss in a bit more detail, please reach out to the team at LX Studio today.
