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 here
to 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.
