Monitoring New Manager Training With The Help Of Advanced Learning Analytics
Managers have a great deal of influence on the success of the organisation, so having a well thought out training programme as well as the right tools in place to measure the value of your training is vital if you intend to see any real success.
Learning analytics isn’t just about measuring what gets done. They need to be actionable and aligned with performance.
We see it far too often, L&D teams focus on engagement surveys and assessment results. But what does this actually measure? Sure, your employees are engaged with your courses and passed tests most likely through memorising answers, but what value does this actually bring?
Instead of just focusing on L&D metrics, organisations need to move their thinking to better performance and productivity. This starts by recognising where the real value lies, and how your new manager training can align to achieving actual business KPIs.
So what should you actually be measuring? Take a look at the tips below to align your new manager training programme with your business goals to enable faster and better working across the whole organisation.
Distinguish Real Issues
Before you begin measuring anything, you must understand what your new managers need help with. Gone are the days of ‘static learning’; learning experiences need to move at the speed of business, so L&D teams need to be flexible and agile with their approach.
Talk to your new managers, gather feedback as to what their common concerns are, and use this to shape your training programme from the very beginning.
After speaking to your new managers, gather senior managers and experts, and discuss the concerns they had when they started their roles and the questions they still have. Look over all these conversations and identify the common factors. These are likely to be common concerns across the whole organisation so use these insights to support your new managers based on experience and feedback.
By doing this, you support your new managers by providing training materials they actually need to help them to address real issues that impact them.
After addressing the problems that need to be solved, you can then focus on measuring progress and milestones that solve these problems. You’ll find these measurements will prove to be far more valuable than ‘learning metrics’ because they move away from generic data and instead allow you to experiment, adapt and improve performance.
Adapt And Improve
You should be looking at the performance of your new managers. Are your new managers supporting their teams better since experiencing your new manager training programme? Is the business seeing higher productivity and morale as a result?
Think about the learning analytics that will help you answer these questions. For example:
- What percentage of your new managers have completed their training?
- How many new managers are happy in their roles and feel prepared?
- Have your new managers been performing better or worse since starting their role?
- Is engagement increasing or decreasing based on how long they’ve been in their role?
Use those insights to measure what is or isn’t working and where changes need to be made, and run experiments with different groups to see where there’s more value. When an experiment answers your key questions, you’ll be able to see the impact made and which approach achieves results.
Create A Long-Term Plan
Your advanced learning analytics journey does not begin with solely using data to prove the effectiveness or value of your learning solutions. Learning analytics should be used for continuous improvement to ensure your new manager training programme is effective and providing value to the business.
By understanding the real problems that need solving you have a starting point. You should then focus on continuously looking for ways to improve your training programme by gathering new insights and experimenting to see better results.
Ultimately, you need to be able to deliver value to the employees and organisation, so they can be smarter and faster for the business.
In Summary
Adapting the way L&D works isn’t something to be afraid of and in the modern workplace, it’s certainly not something we can avoid.
We need to move away from just delivering training and instead become smarter, more agile, and use smart insights that determine real value.
Training new managers has always been important, but the workplace has transformed rapidly since the rise in digital and therefore it’s important to ensure your organisation can keep up. Download the eBook Impactful New Manager Training Using A NextGen LMS: A Complete Guide For L&D Professionals and find out how good leaders will guide their teams to achieve higher performance, better productivity, and improved morale, so training your managers in the right way is essential.
