Measuring Your Training Success

Demonstrate the value of a training program.

It is often difficult to establish and justify training budgets, since demonstrating the company's return on investment for training can be a challenge. But by tying training directly to a quantifiable factor, such as improved productivity or process improvement, you can come up with a dollar figure that reflects the value of the training to your company's bottom line.

The standard formula for computing your ROI for training is ROI (percentage) = (Monetary benefits – Training Costs)/Training Costs) x 100.

When determining how success will be measured, it’s important to break up the indicators into a few buckets. Look at measuring both the content and the user experience to get the whole picture. These can be separated to give you more granular detail on any areas for improvements and success.

Tracking Metrics

Depending on what the MicroLearning is about, there are many options for gathering metrics to measure success. If the content is on product training, looking at sales numbers is key. This can be looking at transaction size, sales mix, year over year number and so on. It’s important to work with leadership and the stakeholders to find and agree on these metrics prior to launching. This should also identify who will be responsible for analyzing the data and produce the desired reports.

Keep in mind this same type of measurement can go well beyond just sales numbers and product training. If the training is on cash management procedures for retail stores, looking at the number of errors or support calls to operations can be a powerful metric to measure. These can also extend to compliance training where internal or regulatory audits can also provide metrics to track.

The User Experience

The user experience is key for MicroLearning since many of the learners haven’t seen this in corporate training. The learner may be comfortable Googling a specific task at home and watching a video on how to do a minor home improvement project but not at work. Knowing how they experience MicroLearning though the LMS can be very insightful to make improvements as your MicroLearning strategy evolves. Measuring the success of the user experience can be done through traditional methods such as questions in a survey or notes from support calls but we can also leverage other data. Having support requests categorized by MicroLearning and traditional learning then identifying the percentage of calls related to the user experience for each of them over time will help indicate the effectiveness of the program. 

For the experience and overall effectiveness, it’s important to have a baseline for any learning and development support. If you don’t already have a method of tracking support requests, now would be a good time to look at it. For even the smallest of organizations, it’s important that this be tracked. It can be done simply by keeping a spreadsheet or using one of the many free ticketing systems available. But this information is critical on measuring and improving the success of this and other training projects.

Going beyond the effectiveness of the user experience that includes if the learner was able to find the content they needed, had any issues consuming the learning, or had any technical issues. Finding out these answers will help you make sure you are leveraging the LMS and packaging your content correctly, breaking down the content correctly and promoting it clearly.