Blog February 15, 2023
Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that we can measure matters. – V F Ridgway
In a recent webinar hosted with the Learning and Performance Institute (LPI), Valamis discussed how learning data can help leaders pinpoint effective learning strategies, demonstrate savings in time and money and how data can deliver better business results leading to competitive advantage.
Together with an audience of 103 learning leaders who participated, the following was discussed:
Going back to basics, learning data is information that is collected from an individual’s learning actions, behaviour, and the context in which this took place.
The main area that L&D can miss is that learning goes beyond reporting on the company’s compliance status! It can (or should) be utilised to help ensure ongoing, sustainable talent development and provide learning leaders with the tools to understand learner behaviours.
In addition, it ensures that learning is meaningful, relevant and offers a memorable learning experience, creating the appetite to return.
In order to clarify what you want to achieve with learning data, it’s important to first ask ourselves the following questions:
Setting these goals will determine what success looks like in the long term. The audience was asked what learning data they were currently collecting. The results were as follows:
The answers confirmed that the majority were collecting data, albeit for differing reasons.
However, collecting data is the easy part; we are surrounded by it today, but it’s what you do with it next that really matters. Therefore, the same group was asked how and what they used this learning data for:
Learning data can typically consist of course completion rates, assessment scores, learner satisfaction and learning engagement.
These insights can tell your organisation not only about the learners, but about the effectiveness of your training and development strategy as well.
One of the most important pieces of information that your learning data will tell you is where individuals are with their current set of skills and if there are any skills gaps present amongst your teams.
Having the data readily available to analyse your employees’ capabilities will give your organisation a better understanding of where to direct your learning content in order to fill any gaps that are prevalent in your learners.
An example of a skills overview data report in Valamis LXP
Having the right set of data about your learners will be able to prepare individuals and your organisation for future growth.
Along with current skills, data can inform your organisation about an individual’s interests through their learning history, career goals and performance data. By combining this data with an employee’s aspirations and assessment of a potential fit, leaders can map out career development plans and make informed decisions about the best lateral moves for employees.
An example of an average skills weight by department report in Valamis LXP
Learning analytics about the current talent in your organisation will be able to provide key information to HR departments and help them make data-supported decisions about talent attraction, training, development and retention. Analysing current skill level data and reviewing skill gaps helps HR to understand what areas to hire new talent or train and develop existing talent.
Developing a strong and engaging development plan for employees within your learning system will help retain top talent. Learning data will also help organisations to evaluate the impact of their investments in employee learning and, moving forward, will provide better information to make data-driven decisions to improve or change development strategies.
An example of a skills gap analysis report in Valamis LXP
Learning metrics can serve as a way of measuring the impact of training and development strategies within your organisation, but it can also prove to be useful beyond L&D departments and help organisations optimise their strategies for maximum business impact.
Learning metrics should align with goals and objectives of the company. By regularly tracking learning data reports, you can adjust training to continuously adjust or improve business strategies.
For example, if one of your business objectives is to improve customer interactions and increase satisfaction, you can use data to tell you learning scores on customer training to understand what areas your team needs to focus on or by reviewing data about learner engagement in courses, you can understand the effectiveness of your customer service training programme.
Although business goals differ from company to company, there are typically several standard learning metrics in place:
After considering the various ways in which the data already being collected could be used, our same webinar audience was asked how they might consider using their learning data moving forward now that they had heard ways to connect the data to business goals. The change in how they viewed the possibilities that are capable with the right data collection was noticeable.
In terms of using data for talent management and succession planning, there was a 50% increase in responses. There was also a marked increase in those who would now begin to utilise learning data for analysing skills gaps and an overall agreement that these learning leaders would now give more time to examining how they could use employee’s learning data to demonstrate the ROI of L&D strategies and the cost benefits of training.
Data about your current L&D efforts will be able to inform and support business achievements and set the course for establishing future goals. Your reporting data should be able to tell you the skills of employees, areas for improvements, and the impact of your training strategies on job and business performance. Using this data should then be used to support informed decision making about organisational changes and resource allocation and drive continuous organisational development.
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Our audience proved that learning strategies and content curation methods are not a one size fits all. Organisations naturally vary in what they are trying to achieve. Answering how learning interventions and learning analytic design will support both personal and organisational success is becoming more evident in board-level conversations.
In any goal measurement, a degree of analysis, design, implementation and review is needed to ensure that improvements are made. But knowing where to focus efforts or, indeed, where to place effort in realising results comes from a thorough understanding of how people learn and how this links to an intrinsic need for success. Begin with the end in mind (success), and let your learning interventions and data analytics flow from this.
For further exploration of this topic join this webinar with Peter Manniche Riber, Head of Learning & Analytics at Novo Nordisk, and Jari Järvelä, Chief Visionary Officer at Valamis, to learn: