Introduction
Every student and employee worldwide have had to undergo tests and evaluations to measure their capabilities and potential. Employees go through regular learning courses and subsequent assessments to understand how well they inculcated the knowledge delivered. However, it is not just the humans that must be tested – it is of extreme importance that the training system be regularly evaluated too to judge their effectiveness and locate areas that need improvement or reform.
There are many popular models that can be used to measure training effectiveness. You have the:
- Phillips ROI Model
- Kirkpatrick Model
- Kaufman’s Model
- CIRO Model
- CIPP Model
- Success Case Method
- Brinkerhoff Model
- Anderson's Model
- Learning-Transfer Evaluation Model
- Holton’s Evaluation Model
While lack of awareness regarding the issue, misjudgment regarding evaluation metrics and data, and lack of complete visibility are some primary reasons for proper evaluation failure, the most concerning and common one would be the lack of a suitable analytics platform. Even though many LMSs and DAPs have built-in analytics modules, most are not powerful enough to fulfill the needs of global enterprises. However, Assima is built differently. Our analytics dashboard is one of the most impressive ones you will see in the systems training world. Keep reading to find out why.
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Why Measuring Training Effectiveness Matters
Measuring training effectiveness is the only way to gauge employee training outcomes. If you have no idea how your training program is performing or how your employees are faring, you will be going in blind when setting expectations and goals for their future performance on the live system. This can have a serious impact on your business.
Impact on Productivity and Performance
Creating a training program that perfectly fits your workforce from the start is nearly impossible. Adjustments are necessary along the way. However, without training impact measurement, it's difficult to identify the necessary changes. As a result, trainees may not learn effectively, which can impact their performance when they transition to the live system.
There will be doubts, errors, and a severe lack of confidence among employees, slowing down operations, causing resource wastage and endangerment of sensitive business data, and an overload of support calls to the unprepared helpdesk team. The bottleneck created will affect business operations in the entire workflow and severely affect productivity across departments.
L&D Accountability and Strategic Alignment
The responsibility for the failure of a training program inevitably falls on the L&D department. However, they themselves might not have complete clarity on how to evaluate training programs in a productive manner or gain actionable insights into the cause of failure. Measuring L&D training ROI is never enough – it is an important metric, but it only measures the fallout, not the causal factors.
Universal strategic alignment is necessary in cases where there is no standard procedure for measuring training effectiveness. The L&D department will definitely have to rethink their training deployment and tracking procedures, but the onus is not on them alone. For starters, the right training technology must be implemented, that incorporates customizable analytics functionalities. A culture of constant training and evaluation must be inculcated among employees, one that rewards winning results and does not treat assessments as just another chore to be completed. Accordingly, employee schedules and work expectations must also be rearranged so that they have the time and bandwidth to complete training within their workday. Juniors follow their seniors by example; hence, managerial staff must also participate in training programs and reiterate the importance of necessary skills development, upskilling, and reskilling.
Importance of Ongoing Evaluation, Not Just One-Time Metrics
The main issue with one-time evaluation systems is that they only provide a snapshot of the training's effectiveness at that moment. However, training needs, progress, goals, and preferences are constantly evolving. It's crucial to assess the impact of insights gained from the initial evaluation and adjust the training program accordingly. While some areas may show improvement, others might suffer. Without continuous evaluation, it's impossible to understand how initial changes have fared and whether further adjustments are necessary.
Moreover, as new employees join, you must also take their requirements into account and accommodate them into the training program. Just as the workforce needs to evolve and upskill to stay ahead of the times, your training program must match step too, and that is only possible with continuing evaluations.
Common Challenges in Evaluating Training
The most commonly faced challenges in corporate training measurement are:
Disconnected Systems and Fragmented Data
Often, your training platform is not connected properly to your analytics system, giving rise to missing or fragmented data. Such data can result in reduced visibility of the effectiveness of training or even mislead you to incorrect conclusions.
Training Without Defined KPIs
Training your employees without properly defining the KPIs to be measured or the goals to be hit results in a directionless system. Even if your employees are learning and improving, what they gain might end up being completely useless for your business.
Lack of Follow-up Post-Training
Not obtaining feedback from trainees and assessing their competence post-training can leave you in the dark regarding their readiness to use the live system. This can jeopardize your business and leave the next batch to train on an imperfect learning program.
Manual Tracking Processes
Manual tracking systems not only require excessive manpower, time, and resources but are also not equipped to handle the large amounts of evaluation data that enterprise training generates. They also often lack accuracy and real-time capabilities.
Key Metrics to Measure Training Success
Employee training success is a multi-dimensional variable – to get a complete picture of it, you need to look at it from different angles using different KPIs for a 360° picture. Here is a list of aspects that you must consider for measuring training effectiveness:
User Performance in Training Evaluations
One of the most essential perspectives for judging the effectiveness of your training program is to assess learner performance during training evaluations. Metrics like completion rate, pass rate, drop-off rate, drop-off point, best-performance lesson module, worst-performance lesson module, etc. give a direct view of the training effectiveness of that round.
Knowledge Application in Real Tasks
This part comes under post-training evaluation of performance. It is a measure of how well the training translates to real-life performance. Some of the KPIs you should track here are change in ROI, productivity and efficiency improvement, change in task completion time and rate, time-to-productivity, cost of getting to optimum productivity level, etc.
Support Tickets and Error Rates
This aspect of measuring training effectiveness is a secondary approach and should be considered after eliminating non-applicable factors from the picture. Error rates and subsequently, the number of support tickets or helpdesk calls from freshly trained employees over a period helps you understand any gaps or misinterpretations in the lessons delivered.
Feedback From Managers and Employees
Numerical training effectiveness metrics give you a quantitative measure of training success while training feedback from employees and managers gives you a more qualitative understanding of their experience. It helps you gauge how the learners reacted to the training or benefitted from it as perceived by them, irrespective of its effect on their work.
Assima’s Metrics
Assima uses an in-depth analytics dashboard that tracks every action and input by every user and presents them using highly detailed metrics and data to paint a precise picture of the state of learning among the target group. KPIs like task accuracy, attempt number, task repetition rate, task accuracy, and error analytics tell you exactly how each learner is faring and help in having higher visibility and control over learning effectiveness tracking.
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How Assima Train Helps You Get It Right
Assima takes performance analytics very seriously. The features that take Assima Train performance tracking to the next level are:
Centralized Analytics Dashboard
As we mentioned before, Assima Train incorporates a detail-oriented, results-driven analytics dashboard for accurately measuring training effectiveness. It gives you access to the stats of all users accessing the training and provides actionable insights for organized visibility.
Progress Tracking by Role or Department
Besides individual performance, you can also group users based on their roles, teams, departments, and other such grouping and filtering variables, so that you can get a better idea of performance based on group skills and job descriptions.
Real-time Performance Analysis
You can also analyze the performance of your employees in training in real time on the Assima dashboard. You can keep track of every action of a learner, updated within milliseconds, which allows you to get insights into learner behavior without any filters or edits.
Visual Data for Decision-Making
Assima does not just present you with lengthy logs of user performance data; it compiles and processes said data into usable information. Then, it presents this information in the form of graphic statistical tools to help visualize the state of learning among users.
Best Practices for Measuring Training Effectiveness
Training analytics for enterprises comprises a combination of the right metrics to be measured, the right analytics tools to capture the necessary data, as well as the best analysis practices to ensure that you get an accurate and all-around picture of the variables you are trying to measure. We have discussed the metrics and tools in detail above, so here is a list of some best practices that are a must for successful training effectiveness measurement:
Combine Qualitative and Quantitative Data
Measuring training effectiveness is a holistic process that requires careful consideration of both the quantitative measurement of KPIs and the qualitative assessment of feedback. One without the other only paints an incomplete and inaccurate picture of the true state of training.
Benchmark Results by Department
While individual performance analysis is important, results breakdown based on learning groups like department, team, job role, and subdivision are critical as well. It can give you powerful insights into model training behavior within these groups to base your training program on.
Track Learner and Training Program Success Metrics
The results of a training program are as reliant on individual learner success as it is on the effectiveness and relevance of the training program itself. When you notice an area that could use improvement, check both what the learner needs as well as where the program is deficient.
Align KPIs with Business Goals
This is something most organizations often get wrong – they either use metrics that are too general for their use case or do have the foresight to choose specific KPIs but end up using the wrong ones. A little extra research on this part can help you go miles further in your training.
Run Training Effectiveness Reviews Quarterly
Continuous evaluations are essential for measuring and maintaining training effectiveness. Over time, employee needs and expertise levels evolve, business goals and requirements shift, and new software upgrades are introduced. Regular reviews help you stay ahead of these changes.
Conclusion
Preparedness is crucial for success in any scenario, including software adoption and digital transformation. Effective training equips employees to work confidently with new systems. However, training without measurement lacks strategy. Even if you pursue the right business goals, only data-driven training based on measured results will help you achieve them. Assima Train is designed not only for measuring training effectiveness but also generating actionable insights that can transform your training program into something valued by both the workforce and the C-suite.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Let’s Answer Some of Your Questions.
Most enterprises do not know how to measure training effectiveness or do not have the right tools to do so. Even if they do, it can be difficult to incorporate the more qualitative metrics into the equation. Measuring training effectiveness is a complex process, and often, businesses find it challenging to implement effectively.
Post-training employee performance, completion and pass rates, training frequency, completion time, NPS and feedback, support call volume change, drop-off rate and point, etc. are some key metrics for training evaluation.
The Assima Train platform comes with an analytics module that not only provides data on the individual actions of every trainee but also compiles this data into useful, actionable insights, presented all on a clean, centralized dashboard.
The simple answer to this question is to track the progress of every learner with granular meticulousness. However, there is more to it – you must choose to track metrics that reflect the goals and needs of your employees as well as your business. Otherwise, you would be looking at the wrong factors while the ones that can give you critical information go unnoticed.
Measuring training effectiveness allows you to pinpoint which employees are faring well and who need extra help or a different approach, which parts of the training program suit the target audience and which ones need to be changed, and whether the training provided helps develop the right skills for the job. Wherever you find a gap or disjoint, you can push for improvement. By accurately aligning training with the needs of your business and employees, you ensure optimum learning that translates to optimum performance, boosting ROI.