How Businesses Can Measure Online Training ROI & Performance

You feel relaxed after launching the big online training initiative and suddenly these questions start to haunt you: “How do I know if my learners understood the material or not? Was the training effective? Is the survey which I had shared with the attendees to get feedback was really enough or do I need something more?”

Every year, organizations globally spend millions of dollars on training. According to the ATD 2016 State of the Industry report, businesses spend about $1,252 per employee on training and development, and the average employee receives 33.5 hours of training per year. Hence, it is important to find out if the training you offered was effective or not.

While evaluation techniques are not new but the days of measuring online learning based on multiple-choice questions have little relevance in today’s world. Many of you may ask why? The logic is simple. This kind of measurement emphasize on short-term information retention as compared to a long-term ability to apply knowledge. After all, the target of corporate learning is not only to see a higher ROI on training but also to improve the skill sets of the learners.

One can say that businesses are more committed to training employees nowadays. And this makes complete sense. Gallup recently stated 89% of business leaders are of the opinion that the new university graduates don’t have all the needed competencies to do their job perfectly after they are hired by a company. Going further, as new technology is changing the way people perform their tasks, it is more important than before to update the older workforce about the latest advancements.

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Since change is unbelievably fast and furious in the online training space, it is important to find out if your training is actually making a contribution to the growth of your business.

Here in this post, we will shed light on some of the ways that will help you measure the training performance so that your investment doesn’t go waste and your employees have what they need to be successful.

Are your Employees Putting the Newly Acquired Skills to Practice

One of the easiest ways to judge if your employees retained the knowledge offered to them via online training is by observing if the newly acquired knowledge is put to use in day-to-day tasks. Do they still need assistance or are they able to handle responsibilities on their own?

Based on the targets of your online training (skill enhancement, knowledge acquisition, etc), measure your employees’ learning on their performance before and after they attend the online training.

Leverage Scenario-Based Tests

If you are not really sure to evaluate the efficiency of your online training based on observations, you can support your judgement with scenario-based tests. Want to know how? Just ask your learners to perform particular tasks and observe the outcome of the scenario to understand if the training takers passed or failed the test.

Scenario-based tests will let you judge the efficiency of online training course without impacting the customer service. You can ask them to engage in specific scenario-focused tasks and observe the outcome. When they fail to achieve targets, it indicates that the method needs to be revised, behaviors should change, offer additional training material until the concept is completely grasped.

Use of Performance Goals

Here, you are expected to compare performance both before and after training. When you want to judge performance before the training, it is the key to analyze your audience and ensure that you are aware of their knowledge and experience level. This is one of the ways you will be able to find out if your employees have achieved their goal or not when they complete the online training. To make things work in your favor and maintain the focus level of your trainees, it is important to link your training back to performance expectations.

Assessments will Help you Measure Employees’ Knowledge and Skills

Assessments are great for analyzing weaknesses and identifying the gap areas in a training program. They give you the opportunity to make your training more learner-centric. For instance, if the majority of the employees fail to pass an assessment after the completion of the training, then it indicates that things – either content or delivery mode – isn’t right.  You may consider including more interactive elements or even breaking the online training content down into easy to digest chunks. In this situation, supporting your training content with quizzes, tests and exams can do wonders and help you get an in-depth insight.

It is best to offer your training takers with the same tests that assess their skills twice: before and after the training. This will help you compare the scores and measure the effectiveness of training. Using a learner-centered approach is the best way to personalize the training experience by emphasizing on the particular skill sets of the trainees.

Gain Insight from Training Takers

Learners who took your training are the best judge or critic of a training content. Their feedback and response will come in handy to establish the strengths and weaknesses of the training content.

If you are using an LMS tool for online training, it is best to choose the one that comes with the inbuilt ability to share feedback and offer surveys. At the end of the day, employee satisfaction is important because that is the only possible way to engage and motivate them.

Reporting and Analytics

There are LMS tools that come with built-in reports that display key information like how the employees are progressing, how long it took them to complete a specific training,courses that are pending, how often they are logging in to access training etc. All these data come in handy will let you gauge the training effectiveness and also customize it.

If you decide to meet your training needs with cloud-based ProProfs LMS software, you will be able to access different kinds of reports like –

a.) LMS Course Reports: It shows details such as the names of those who have taken your courses, their email addresses, the I.P. address of their computers, when they took the course and how long it took them to complete the course.  

b.) Reports of quizzes within your course: ProProfs eLearning software will let you view the reports of quizzes and assessments that you have included in your course. These reports show detailed information such as the correct and incorrect answers of learners for each quiz, their scores etc.  

c.) Group Reports: You can view consolidated reports (the courses that have been assigned, the ones taken or those that are pending) of different groups of learners that you have created.  

d.) User Reports: It is possible to view the individual reports (the courses that have been assigned, the ones taken or those that are pending) of different learners.

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Measure ROI

Last but not the least, evaluating online training effectiveness, is the key to measuring ROI. If you are not checking the ROI, it is next to impossible to find out if the performance results you have achieved were really worth the investment.

To measure ROI, estimate the costs (involving the development cost for your online training) and the advantages associated in regard to the online training program (like enhanced productivity levels, jump in sales, less number of customer complaints etc). When you get the cost-to-performance ratio, it is easier to make training more goal-oriented.

Read More: 20 Best Online Training Software

Summing Up

Are you spending a significant portion of your day to fine tune your online training strategy but unable to achieve targets? Just keep these mentioned pointers in mind while measuring the impact of your online training.