Develop Measurable Outcomes For Corporate Training
Creating custom eLearning activities with impactful design is important but difficult. But the best of us often forget one key consideration: How will you determine the outcome of the project? After all, if you don’t end up measurably improving learning outcomes by tracking training ROI, your training program won’t be worth all the effort you put in. Sometimes the measurement of success is just an afterthought.
At AllenComm, we love all aspects of the corporate training process, from content creation to course delivery. And we think measuring training ROI should be a part of the overall strategy before even beginning your design. So, let’s look at 3 phases that will help you design training with the plan to measure results already in mind.
Phase 1: Plan Each Part Of Your Corporate Training Process
To build successful custom eLearning activities, you’re going to need to identify your goals and the impact you want your corporate training experience to have on your employees. Creating a strategy to measure the outcome is all about understanding the current state of your training and the desired future state. On the surface, this sounds simple, but there’s a lot of work to do here. First, you’re going to need to talk to the right people so that everyone understands the business need for your training. By talking to key stakeholders and managers, you can determine:
- What future success looks like
- What ideal performance looks like
- How to create corporate training that is relevant to the needs, struggles, and capabilities of your learners
Once you’ve had conversations with the right people, you’ll want to identify the needs [1] of your learners. This will allow you to understand your goals from a business and training perspective. While it’s important to consider business outcomes (e.g., increased revenue), it’s critical to build goals around measurable behaviors as well.
Phase 2: Design To Meet Your ROI
Now it’s time to move to designing an incredible eLearning course. There are a lot of details that come into play, so let’s take a high-level view at a couple of things you can do to make your course effective.
- Bring the right content into the training
Now that you’ve analyzed your learners’ needs, you’re going to need to find relevant content to help meet those needs. - Identify the right sequence and organization
Creating a course that gives learners the right information in the right order requires logical organization. Build skills upon one another and emphasize the related subjects. Using the right training technology [2] can help create eLearning that flows seamlessly between modules. - Bring context into the content
When you don’t connect the course to your learners’ everyday experiences, they tend to tune out. But when you contextualize the information so that learners see how it applies to their specific roles, they’ll be much more likely to pay attention. - Simulate the real world
Accomplishing tasks in the real world builds both skill and confidence, but that’s more difficult to replicate in training. By creating eLearning activities with immersive learning modalities (i.e., simulations or interactive video), you can help ensure that your training sticks.
Phase 3: Measure Your Results Accurately
The purpose of your training is to have an impact on your business. To that end, companies that provide their employees with solid training have a 24% higher profit margin [3] than companies that don’t. However, you can’t measure the business impact without measuring performance. So, here are a few tips to increase the effectiveness of your measurement strategies.
- Determine short, intermediate, and long-term outcomes
- Get creative as you look for potential indicators of success
- Measure the business results once your employees’ performance starts to meet the goals you set
Learning portals with advanced analytics or performance measurement systems can give you the ability to track complex data during and after training.
Conclusion
As you design, develop, and deploy your training, you’ll frequently refer to the goals you established in the beginning. But the key is to speak with the right people and ask the right questions to define observable and measurable results. Moreover, taking the time upfront to write your goals in a measurable way will make it much easier to determine training ROI and communicate that to organizational leaders.
References:
[1] Corporate Training Process That Gets Results
[2] We Build Custom eLearning Courses With True Learner Engagement