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Features

Published October 2008

Learning Measurements: It’s Time to Align

  

  Mohana Radhakrishnan

Chief learning officers face increased pressure from the C-suite to justify expenses and quantify business decisions. It’s time to re-examine how to measure learning and make a change.

Your training classes have a 92 percent fill rate. A whopping 95 percent of your employees have completed one or more formal training programs. You’re thrilled to see these positive metrics — until upper management asks you to define what employees are learning, where they are learning it and how this learning impacts the company’s bottom line.

Chances are you don’t have an answer. Most learning professionals don’t. It’s time for a paradigm shift in the way we approach learning measurement.

Companies are grappling with issues related to learning measurements. According to a survey conducted in 2007 by Expertus and Training Industry Inc., almost 77 percent of respondents said their current measurements fall short in providing meaningful intelligence for business planning. Additionally, only 16 percent say they have all the information they need for business planning and strategy.

Learning leaders aren’t the only professionals who aren’t getting what they need from current learning measurements. According to the survey, most companies still focus on learning-related metrics such as course completions (84 percent), registrations (57 percent) and learner costs (49 percent). However, 69 percent of the audience looking at these metrics includes business-unit executives and managers.

When your audience is focused on cost-savings and revenue growth, telling them about full classes and the number of people trained just isn’t going to cut it. Business-unit managers want to know what their employees are learning, where they are accessing information and how that knowledge impacts the business. Your LMS can’t answer most of these questions. Workplace trends — such as informal learning, the globalization of the corporate workforce and movements toward alternative work environments where staff members telecommute and job share — continue to be hard to measure.

With increased pressure from the C-suite to deliver comprehensive, meaningful intelligence that business-unit managers can use for strategic planning, it’s more important than ever for learning leaders to have “dollars and sense” in mind. Maximize the measurement tools you already have, develop new methods to measure informal learning and deliver the reports in succinct formats.

Maximize the Tools You Have
According to another Expertus survey, the data sources most frequently used by learning professionals for reporting are LMSs (55 percent), HR systems (47 percent) and performance systems (31 percent). Learning managers say these systems often fall short due to hurdles such as data inaccuracy, lack of adequate data, reporting limitations of the technology and limitations in time to gather and analyze the data.