As learning continually changes to meet internal objectives and external audit requirements, the objective for most organisations using an LMS remains the same: to improve user engagement and increase skills to ultimately improve outcomes.
According to (US) statistics the average company invests approximately £1,014.28 ($1,252) per employee on training and development. Reports also state that the average employee receives an estimated 33.5 hours of training annually.
In healthcare that equates to approximately £4.8 billion a year on undergraduate and postgraduate education training ensuring that the whole health and healthcare sector in England, including the NHS, the independent sector and public health, have access to world class professionals.
Managing learning and statutory /mandatory training through your LMS provides the knowledge and data to demonstrate that your training efforts are working, which in turn help the organisation reach identified goals and ensure that the business is safe.
One way to track and measure the effectiveness of your training programmes is by automatically generating reports based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are measures your training outcomes and help put auditable data within easy reach. These then inform internal decisions, and enable you to provide the data for external audit.
some examples of KPIs
A KPI can focus on factors directly related to training, such as how many employees are marked as completed, how many are behind schedule, or how many booked but failed to attend.
Others focus more on how a training programme impacts business results, for example the impact on the employee performance before and after a program was implemented.
Integrating your LMS to internal performance management tools can give you a better picture of an employee’s performance. Did you know that Totara Learn integrates seamlessly to the Totara performance module?
Totara can make it easy to track training KPIs as it captures data automatically and makes it simple to generate reports. We can then schedule the output of automated data from the LMS to your internal KPI dashboard system(s).
When determining which KPIs to track take time with internal stakeholders to ensure that everyone has a clear interpretation of the requirements. Keep in mind, the importance and relevance of KPIs can vary from one organisation to the next and across sectors so do your homework.
Some suggested KPIs could include;
employee progress
In order to understand how effective a course is and the cost to the business for delivery, you first need to know how many people have completed the various modules, and how quickly they are progressing. On top of basic attendance and course completion data, you may also have to keep track of hours spent on training and be able to demonstrate this by staff group, gender, ethnicity, age (etc).
Who is, or is not enrolled?
What are the start, end and due dates?
Who is complete, or not-complete with their required courses?
This data is helpful for noticing where employees are failing to complete training thus
enabling the organisation, its managers and employees to act before it is too late.
compliance outcomes and data
Attendance data
Completion rate
Time spent
Certificates issued or expired
Audit trail reporting
Many training programmes incorporate policy and mandatory renewal training, so tracking the dates when certifications are issued and in turn expire is key. Making this information available to employees and their managers upon login will greatly improve compliance.
Totara enables you to fully automate compliance reporting.
ChamburyLS's Dynamic Info Blocks include features that track employee progress and automatically alert them and their managers when completion deadlines are in danger of being missed, or when certifications are about to expire. Again increasing compliance and ensuring that your KPIs show positive outcomes.
course activity and engagement
While completion of completion and compliance is useful, you can drill into the data to look at how your employees are gaining the knowledge.
Number of active logins
Number of course visits
Number of resource views
Forum activity
Assignment completion rates
Time spent on activities
Activity completion criteria (e.g. number of assignments, quizzes)
Average attempt grade against last attempt grade
Analysing activity access lets you know how your employees engage with your content. Alongside this interactions with feedback, forums, blogs and resources demonstrate how actively staff are applying their new knowledge in the workplace.
This data also allows eContent developers and your face-to-face trainers to see which elements of the course are being used most informing course content development / improvement.
For trainers and subject matter leads, actively monitoring the time an employee takes to complete an activity can highlight useful data. For example, if employees are racing through the resources and passing the linked tests, it may suggest a shift, for some users, to a more knowledge assessment based approach. The opposite would suggest that the learning resources may need updating to be more pertinent and updated to meet latest legislation and guidance. IT can also suggest that different approaches for different staff groups maybe a useful approach.
feedback and evaluation
Pre/post-assessment: quiz statistics, questions, grades
Feedback analysis: surveys, questionnaires, comments
Trends across courses, sections, groups of trainees
Trends of success or opportunities for intervention across training initiatives
It is often remarked that you can track how long and how much has been spent on training staff, but it can be difficult to know the actual impact in the workplace of that training.
This is especially key for training accessed outside of the workplace, eg at higher education, conferences and professional bodies. The organisation pays for employees to attend, but the knowledge outcome tends to call into a 'black hole'. Some simple post training assessments and community forums can enable that knowledge to be shared across multiple employees upon their return and show a return on the investment.
You can use both pre & post-course assessment to determine the starting point, average and end point by employee and by training activity to show knowledge growth, a combination of pre-course quizzes, post course tests and follow up evaluations to gather outcomes. Totara can manage this automatically with access restrictions to branch users through assessments, and reminders to complete their evaluation(s) once the training has been completed.
Job proficiency over time
Proficiency KPIs often cover areas like:
The quality of work
Competence achievements
job-related task performance
This KPI can help you better identify employees that are eligible for promotion, as well as determine which departments are more successful in their training activities. You can also run these reports to track the training progress of individual employees, or as part of a department. It’s an efficient way to identify employees who are fully competent in their job role when you need to plan for succession and head-hunt for new posts.
the bottom line
Understanding how successful training programmes are can dramatically impact organisational performance. It is so important that organisations can track employee performance, alongside training delivery and how this is improving outcomes, so the management of clear KPIs links to your LMS is a key part of why you have an LMS, and the importance of having the right LMS.
Why a better LMS will make learning simple here
... and Why you may need a new LMS here
Written with contribution from the team at Totara HQ. Find the original post on the Totara blog.