The Most Important Training Metrics to Track for Any L&D Strategy

Without data, corporate training and development strategies fall flat. Every learning and development training initiative must be backed by data insights to determine its effectiveness. For training managers, data insights demonstrate the importance of learning and development strategies to higher-level authorities, making it clear to leadership that training is a necessary and beneficial element of the corporate experience.

A digital LMS platform makes data-driven training accessible and easy for companies because insights are automatically collected by the platform. The ExpertusONE LMS makes it easy for training managers to monitor compliance, determine which courses are or are not being taken, and follow up with learners who may not be meeting course requirements.

Data-driven training is especially important in technical industries like healthcare, manufacturing, or high technology, where employees, customers, partners, and sales teams may operate in high-stakes environments.

Essential L&D Metrics to Track

You likely already understand the basics of training metrics: completion metrics, compliance rates, and other course data. The metrics that you use and goals that you set may vary by learning audience. Companies looking to boost employee engagement may put a higher emphasis on completion rates while companies focusing on sales enablement training may cross-reference training data with win rates.

Here are the most important training metrics to track for each audience.

Employee Training Metrics

Completion Rates

First and foremost, you should track and measure how many of your team members are taking courses and completing them.

Knowledge Retention

Look to quizzes, polls, and other knowledge-retention measurements to determine if the training within your program is resonating with learners. Low scores on quizzes and polls, or incomplete scores, may indicate that the training program is too challenging for learners and needs to be adjusted.

Skills Development

When your employees complete a training program, they should walk away with new skills. The best way to track skills development and progress is to assess the learner’s skills at the beginning of the program (using a skills assessment) and afterward.

Employee Satisfaction

Look to completion rates, engagement, and feedback from employees to gauge whether or not your team is enjoying the learning experience.

Customer Training Metrics

Time to Completion Rate

Understanding the length of time it takes for your customers to get the knowledge they need from your learning program can help you identify ways to improve and streamline the learning experience.

Training Engagement Rates

Customer training should add value to your relationship with customers and create a positive brand experience. If customers are engaging with your training program, this is good news: it’s adding value. If you find that customers don’t access training content or are not engaging, it may be time to adjust.

Business Growth

Many enterprise organizations use training as a business development strategy. An LMS with e-commerce features can reveal whether or not training program attendance is increasing and how much revenue the program is generating.

Partner Training Metrics

Total Number of Partners

Partner training should extend your network and generate new business for your brand. If you notice an increase in the number of partners participating in your program, that’s a sure sign of training effectiveness.

Course Completion

Understanding whether partners are completing courses will help you determine whether those courses are effective and whether your partners are properly equipped.

Partner Revenue

The amount of revenue your partners generate could be correlated to training (and indicate that they may need further training).

Sales enablement training metrics

Time to Proficiency

Measure the time it takes for your sales team to get from initial onboarding to working in the field to determine how training can be more efficient.

Win Rates

If your sales team isn’t successful, it could be a training problem. Measuring win rates before, during, and after training will tell you if you need to invest more effort in sales skills training like closing techniques or objection handling.

Learner assessments are a skills-driven training metric.

Engaged learners are self-aware. To get the most out of training, learners must understand why they should take a course in the first place. Self-assessments empower learners to understand their training needs and take ownership of the process. Through personalized questionnaires and polls, learners can identify knowledge gaps and figure out where they should start.

The ExpertusONE LMS platform offers a checklist that can help both learners and training managers assess skills and determine knowledge gaps. Learners can self-assess to determine where they stand in skillsets, certifications, and course competencies. This detailed reporting can help learners become motivated to complete further training and be more competitive in their fields. The platform’s artificial intelligence feature—which recommends courses based on a learner’s interests or the interests of others with similar job descriptions—can also reveal learning opportunities for the individual. The platform’s personalized recommendations can help learners navigate a large course library without feeling overwhelmed. With a customized experience, learners are allowed to build their own learning strategies to expand their knowledge and expertise.

Training managers should also assess learners to determine their skills and competencies. Using ExpertusONE’s skills checklist, managers can get rid of cumbersome, inefficient paper document assessments and digitize the entire process. This way, learner progress is easily tracked and can be referenced at any time. The observation checklist feature is especially beneficial for training that must happen in the field, whether the assessment takes place in a factory or on an in-person sales call with a prospective client. The platform is easy to use and on demand so that managers can access the checklist at any time.

The culture of corporate learning and development has shifted to a prioritization of skills development, a strategy that ensures that learners walk away from courses with a skill that is applicable to their role. Previously, corporate learning and development were understood (and expected) to offer generalized courses or overarching training about topics like corporate policies or industry insights, not necessarily training that was tied to specific skills. Now, with growing skills gaps across industries, companies must focus on their training programs and provide actionable learning opportunities. This way, they can engage employees and provide value within the employee experience while also bridging the gaps in skills.

These variations of learner assessments come together to form a comprehensive picture of the learner’s experience and status in their training goals. With a digital LMS platform, it’s easy for learners and training managers alike to pull multiple types of training assessments and metrics and compare them all at once to understand the learner’s experience. These data points are essential training metrics that reveal the impact and success of a training program.

Compliance reporting is essential in corporate learning and development programs.

Perhaps the most important training metric for technical fields, compliance reporting tells managers and organizations where they stand in relation to industry-wide regulations. Compliance reporting can make or break an organization’s status in its industry, and it’s a critical component of any training strategy because it is what keeps companies in line with the standards for the field.

Compliance reporting on a digital LMS platform can look like a variety of different metrics pulled together to create a picture of the organization’s status. Organizational leaders will need both a large-scale picture of the company’s compliance status—overall, how many learners are in or out of compliance—and a detailed report so that they can follow up with learners who have fallen out of compliance. Managers should also have access to regular compliance reports because they have a more hands-on role to fill in the overall learning strategy. They are responsible for following up with their team members when those team members fall out of compliance.

With the ExpertusONE LMS platform, managers can run a compliance report from any location thanks to the mobile functionality of the application. This is a valuable tool for managers who may need to pull up compliance reports while discussing something with a team member while they are out on the field. And, if a manager is ever questioned about their team’s compliance, they can easily demonstrate their adherence to regulations by showing the report. The same is possible for individual employees, who can pull up a list of their certifications and skill competencies to show if someone questions them in the field.

The ExpertusONE platform makes it easy for managers to pull a variety of reports about compliance. Depending on the complexity desired, the platform can pull from all available LMS data to determine the overall compliance of a group or of a specific team member. This ease of use is critical for companies that track multiple types of compliance needs. For instance, most healthcare professionals will have multiple certifications that need to be updated each year to ensure their skills are adequate. With a digital LMS platform, managers can follow up with learners to ensure that deadlines are met. Learners can easily track their own compliance training requirements and set aside time as needed to take relevant courses and renew their certifications.

Course engagement data is an essential training metric.

You cannot determine the effectiveness of your training strategy without detailed reports about learners’ engagement with the training content. When learners are taking courses from a variety of locations—at home, on the go, on desktop or mobile devices—managers may be concerned that they are not engaging sufficiently and, therefore not retaining the content. Course engagement data can help managers determine if the necessary information is being retained.

Course engagement data can range from high-level insights like the number of learners who have taken a specific course to specific details about the quiz questions that multiple learners missed. Managers can even embed polls in each course and ask learners whether or not they found the content engaging and impactful. Course engagement data is critical because it helps managers determine where to focus their energy when developing new content or creating new courses.

Creating an effective corporate learning and development strategy can be challenging if you do not understand the needs and interests of your learners. An enterprise LMS platform helps managers and leaders determine where to focus resources so that their teams have the necessary skills to complete their work and the essential certifications to stay compliant in their industry. Instead of relying on outdated training methods and miles of paperwork, organizations can leverage digital tools to create more engaging learning experiences that also collect vital sets of data about the learning experience. In order to create an effective learning strategy, leaders should gather data about learners’ experiences and continue to adjust their strategies for greater impact.

A data-driven digital LMS platform helps organizations make the most out of their investment in corporate training. With detailed insights into knowledge gaps, compliance metrics, and course engagement, leaders can adjust and improve their strategies and create better learning experiences overall.

A learning record store can improve L&D strategy.

ExpertusONE’s Learning Record Store is a storehouse of information about the learning experience. As a critical feature within the LMS, the learning record store enables companies to track every facet of the learning experience and identify opportunities for improvement. All learning data is stored as xAPI statements, making it easy to run reports down the line. No matter the type of training content you are delivering, the learning record store can capture that data in a standardized format so that it can be referenced and analyzed later.

Managing learning experiences in this way is key for companies looking to improve the overall effectiveness of their L&D strategy. By collecting all forms of user data across all learning experiences, companies can understand how learners are engaging with content and where learning gaps may exist.

Interested to see how you can leverage detailed data reporting to create a better corporate learning and development strategy? Contact us today for a demo.