The business landscape is changing faster than ever. Companies need to keep employees compliant with changes to regulation and ensure they are up to date with all their latest service and product offerings. On this journey, learning and development needs to represent ROI, and measuring training effectiveness is therefore the first port of call.
HR Managers and training teams must act now to stay ahead of the curve. Those who don’t implement a learning management system (LMS) run the risk of suffering cost overrun, compliance issues, and having employees provide misinformation to both prospects and clients.
Legacy learning programs, such as fill-in-the-dot sheets, have been replaced by online LMSs that allow organizations to quickly measure the effectiveness of courses while providing HR Managers and training teams with immediate results.
If you’re not able to measure the impact of an initiative and report a return on investment in today’s business world, it will ultimately be concluded. Learning and development programs require money to execute, so having an automated LMS, such as GoSkills, will provide quick and accurate reporting to help prove ROI, all while measuring training effectiveness.
HR Managers and Training Teams
The information below demonstrates how HR managers and training teams can measure the effectiveness of their programs. If your job role falls under Learning and Development or HR, this information will be helpful to you, so take it all in and then implement what you learn. Remember, it’s all about measuring training effectiveness.
Define what matters most to your organization
To measure training effectiveness, you need to understand what’s important to your company and grade activity around those goals. Some companies focus on providing employees with compliance certifications, while others focus on technology adoption and customer service skills. In the end, whatever works best for you is fine.
One of the benefits of implementing an LMS (learning management system) is that training courses can be tailored to fit a company’s specific needs. HR managers and training teams can deliver a wide variety of classes, via several different training methods, with total control over how fast or slow the is consumed, ultimately reducing corporate development training costs while delivering highly-personalized lessons.
Ways to measure training effectiveness
Everything in business needs to be measured, especially LMS training programs. In business, there’s a saying, “If it’s not documented electronically, it never happened,” which seems to hold true more often than ever before, especially with the work from home movement in full swing.
Some ways to measure training effectiveness are:
- Basic assessments - This is the simplest way to track and measure employee skills consistently.
- Time to complete - Setting time limits, so employees need to hyper-focus and then provide answers on what they’ve learned.
- Quick quizzes - A fun way to engage employees and test their knowledge on a particular topic.
- Surveys - Gather information from employees to decide on what new types of training programs they’d like to have offered to them.
- Compliance exams - One of the most important uses of an LMS.
- Employee activity - Track and measure who’s logged in to do additional learning and who’s not participating.
- One-to-one discussions - A great way for a manager to test the skill level and see where the employee development is needed most.
The way you measure training effectiveness is up to you. The important part is that you’re actually doing it.
Using the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model
The Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model is one of the most popular and widely used in learning and development programs. It’s named after Donald Kirkpatrick, a former President of the American Society for Training and Development, also known as ASTD. His four-level model is widely accepted among HR Managers and training teams as the industry standard.
The four levels of Kirkpatrick’s evaluation method are:
Level 1: Reaction
The degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging, and relevant to their jobs.
Level 2: Learning
The degree to which participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills, attitude, confidence, and commitment, based on their participation in the training.
Level 3: Behavior
The degree to which participants apply what they learned during training when they are back on the job.
Level 4: Results
The degree to which targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training and the support and accountability package.
*Please view KirkpatrickPartners.com for more information.
Using all four levels is an excellent way for HR Managers to measure training effectiveness for employees.
What type of training evaluation is right for your company?
Like everything in business, putting your unique spin on training evaluation is where you’re most likely going to see the best results. What works for one organization may not work for you. It’s crucial to utilize an LMS like GoSkills.com offers because it gives you complete flexibility to customize programs while providing detailed reporting where you can easily measure the effectiveness of training based on goals that are important to your company.
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Why implement an (LMS) learning management system right now
- Speed - Deploying an (LMS) learning management system for HR is simple. All an HR Manager or training team needs to do is sign up, assign users to the platform, and then put the required training sessions in their learning queue.
- Accessibility - For both the administrator of the training modules and the end-user, accessibility is 24/7, 365. Logging in is dead-simple, and training schedules follow employees across all types of devices, including PCs and mobile devices.
- Reporting - Detailed reporting is available out of the box and will help provide every piece of information you can imagine. When you need to prove ROI to upper-level management, reporting on employee behavior and activity always comes in handy.
If you’re looking for easy setup, speed, and reliability, implementing a proven (LMS) learning management system is 100% going to save you time and money.
Next Steps
Companies that implement an LMS, like GoSkills.com, will create an environment where employees have the opportunity to remain engaged and up-to-date with important corporate training initiatives.
Running an LMS the old-fashioned way, i.e., through Excel, Google Sheets, and various other manual methods, will become increasingly challenging as remote working practices continue to evolve. Implementing an LMS learning management system will help you avoid compliance-related headaches while fulfilling detailed reporting requirements.
Get started by visiting the GoSkills website and start training your team for free today.
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