The Power Of Evaluation
Evaluation is a critical stage in any training process. Without clear, actionable evaluation, there’s no way to know whether your training has been a success. This means that you can’t improve future training, you can’t explain the power and importance of your training, and you can’t tie your training to business outcomes.
In comparison, a great evaluation will allow you to see exactly where your training is succeeding and failing, and take steps to make it better. It will also allow you to show the rest of your business how powerful your training has been.
We’ve recently written about the key questions you should be asking yourself when evaluating your training. This article will focus on the critical elements that you’ll need to successfully report on your training and drive ongoing evaluation.
Requirement 1: Measure The Right Metrics
How do you define success when it comes to training outcomes?
That should depend on your learning goals, your learners themselves, and how you want your learners to apply their learning (after all, learning is ineffective without application).
Identifying your learning goals [1] and understanding what to measure when evaluating your training [2] are both equally important when it comes to having a better understanding of what to measure and how to measure it.
Requirement 2: Easy Visualisation Means Easy Evaluation
Representing your data through at-a-glance dashboards and charts will allow your trainers and management to instantly see the success of your training programs without having to spend time pulling together reports and spreadsheets.
Most Learning Management Systems have at-a-glance data visualisation, but if yours doesn’t then consider what platforms you could integrate with to improve your data visualisation.
Requirement 3: Real-Time Data Allows For Faster, Better Decisions
Having data that updates in real time becomes critical as your business scales.
Real-time reporting will allow you to make quicker, better-informed decisions when it comes to your training. If most of your reporting is happening within your LMS, then real-time reporting is fairly easy to achieve.
However, some reporting and evaluation may happen outside your LMS. In that case, you may need to enlist some technical support to ensure external reporting happens in real time.
Requirement 4: Granularity Leads To Insight
Whilst it’s essential to have data that can be easily and quickly digested visually, you’ll also need to be able to drill deep into your data to answer more complex questions around your training.
For example, you may have identified a problem with a certain cohort’s engagement rates. How deep can you dive into your data to explore the cause of this problem? Can you see individual learners’ actions within their training and the time they’ve spent on specific screens and tiles? Or can you only see a toppling overview of their quiz scores and total time spent on a resource?
The more granular you can get, the better you’ll set yourself up to mine your data for powerful insights.
Requirement 5: Integrate Your Reporting For A Single Source Of Truth
A lot of trainers have their reporting data siloed within their LMS. In most cases, however, an LMS cannot capture all the data you’ll need to properly evaluate the success of your training.
For example, how are you testing if your training is being applied? If you have a sales team completing a sales training program, you’ll want to know that their close rate is increasing as a result of your program; your LMS won’t be able to capture this information.
As such, integrating your data to ensure that you can view all of your reporting metrics in one place is essential, especially as your training process scales.
Ensure that your LMS has integration capabilities. If it doesn’t, you may need to consider switching LMS.
Requirement 6: Make Reporting Accessible To Key Stakeholders
Finally, the accessibility of your reporting is also key. The power of reporting comes from its ability to positively impact and improve future training processes, and to do that, you’ll need to put your reporting in the right hands.
Reporting will be accessible to training staff, but expanding that accessibility to include your learning design team will allow them to see where their training content was successful, and where they could improve their design for future content.
Making reporting accessible to your learners is also key, as it will allow them to evaluate their own learning and improve future training performance.
Lastly, making reporting available to upper management will let them see the power of training within the business.
Remember: reporting is only as powerful as the actions and changes that it leads to, so use your reporting to make positive changes to your training over time.
Wondering how to implement your own learner-first training model? Download the eBook Establishing A Learner-First Training Model and discover the step by step process on how to perfectly execute the goal of making the learner have success. Also, discover how to incorporate career mapping into your digital training strategy using a learner-first approach through the available Webinar 6 Steps To Incorporate Career Mapping Into Your Digital Training Strategy.
