How to Measure the Success of Your L&D Strategy

As organizations strive to stay competitive and adapt to a rapidly changing business environment, learning and development (L&D) have become crucial components of their growth and success. However, investing in learning without measuring training effectiveness can be a waste of valuable time and resources.

A key indicator of a successful L&D strategy is its alignment with an organization’s overall priorities. However, as McKinsey notes, many L&D functions fail to achieve this goal, with only 40% of companies claiming that their learning strategy aligns with their business objectives. This means that 60% of organizations do not have any explicit connection between their learning programs and their strategic goals. As a result, businesses are missing out on the potential benefits that a well-aligned L&D strategy can offer, such as increased employee productivity, improved customer satisfaction, and overall business growth.

To determine the effectiveness of your L&D strategy, you must set and measure goals along the way. If you want to stay on track with your L&D goals and stay ahead of the game, a digital LMS software offers features like essential tools for tracking and measuring the success of your training program.

Setting Goals for Different Training Audiences

Defining the intended audience is the first step toward creating a successful L&D strategy. Understanding who your learners are, their needs, and their goals is essential. Whether it’s employees, customers, partners, or sales teams, each group has unique requirements and expectations for training programs. Therefore, organizations must tailor their training content and delivery methods accordingly.

The ExpertusONE LMS platform offers intuitive learning delivery and always-on access, so no matter which audiences companies need to train, they have access to innovative LMS features, like dynamic shareable links and embeddable widgets that allow them to place personalized training in the areas learners frequent the most. Plus, with a robust mobile LMS app, learning can be consumed anytime, anywhere─including on/offline sync.

However, identifying the right audience and providing them with the right training is only the beginning. Measuring the effectiveness of your L&D strategy requires setting clear goals and metrics to evaluate the success of your training programs. Managers and instructors can use our learning record store to capture learning insights from any format across real-time dashboards that conglomerate the most important metrics in one easy-to-find place.

For example, if your audience is employees, you might want to measure the impact of your training programs on employee engagement, retention, and performance. Alternatively, if your audience is customers, you could measure the impact of your training programs on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

To achieve these goals, organizations must leverage LMS features that can help track their learners’ progress. These features include customizable dashboards, automated reporting, advanced analytics, and data visualization. By using these tools, organizations can generate reports and analytics to assess the effectiveness of their L&D strategy and make data-driven decisions to improve it further.

Setting Goals for Different Training Objectives

The next step towards measuring the success of your L&D strategy is to define clear goals for different training objectives. Organizations have various objectives for their training programs, such as onboarding, sales enablement, and extended enterprise training. Each objective requires a unique set of metrics to measure its success.

For example, if the objective is onboarding, the metrics for success could be time-to-productivity, new hire retention rates, and employee satisfaction. If the objective is sales enablement, the metrics for success could be increased revenue, improved win rates, and higher customer satisfaction.

Once the objectives and metrics are defined, organizations can use LMS features to track progress toward achieving those goals. An LMS can provide real-time feedback on learner engagement and completion rates, allowing organizations to identify areas of improvement and adjust their L&D strategy accordingly.

Tracking employee performance on the job or in the field can be challenging. But with our LMS-based observation checklist, leaders can now solve the disconnect between online and real-world training. An observation checklist eliminates the need for costly and inefficient paper-based evaluations and allows managers to quickly and accurately determine employee competency for each training objective. This performance data can be collated with other competency data and other learning information for even deeper reporting insights.

Using an objective-based approach allows organizations to measure the impact of their training programs and adjust them to achieve their goals continually. It also enables them to stay agile and responsive to changing business needs.

Measuring the Success of Your L&D Strategy

To evaluate the effectiveness of your L&D strategy comprehensively, it’s essential to combine both audience-based and objective-based approaches. By doing so, organizations can gain a 360-degree view of the impact of their training programs on both their learners and business objectives.

The top ways companies report measuring the success of L&D strategies include qualitative employee surveys and satisfaction of attendees at instructor-led classes—and these ways do work. For instance, suppose the objective is to improve customer satisfaction by providing better product support. In that case, the audience-based approach could involve measuring training program success and customer service representatives’ performance and satisfaction. At the same time, the objective-based approach could involve measuring the reduction in customer complaints and the increase in customer loyalty.

But combining these two approaches provides a more holistic view of the effectiveness of the L&D strategy. By tracking the progress toward achieving both audience-based and objective-based goals, organizations can identify areas of improvement and ensure training program success.

ExpertusONE’s LMS features can be invaluable in this process by providing organizations with a unified view of their training programs’ effectiveness. Our platform offers advanced LMS reporting and analytics tools, personalized dashboards, and customizable workflows to help organizations track training progress.

Ready to see how you can measure the success of your L&D strategy through one streamlined platform? Schedule a free demo today.