How to measure the effectiveness of your workforce training

Organizations create training for all sorts of reasons, but usually, the goals are to improve job performance and make a positive impact on the company’s bottom line. That means the training courses you create to help achieve these goals should deliver knowledge and skills that make people better at their jobs. 

But what if you’ve trained your people and their job performance just hasn’t improved? Was your training ineffective, or were there other factors at play? How can you measure the impact of your training on your learners?

It stands to reason that organizations won’t continue investing in training if it’s not effective. So, it’s important to decide how you’ll measure the effectiveness of your training before you start creating courses. Let’s take a closer look at some considerations you’ll want to keep in mind:

Identify the appropriate metrics or KPIs

An initial step toward measuring the effectiveness of your workforce training is to choose the appropriate metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use for that process.

How can you identify the right metrics? A good starting place is to think about the business objectives driving course creation. Is it fewer operator errors? Increased sales? Whatever the objective is, it should be something that you can measure.

Also, consider any external factors that might skew your measurements. For instance, if your company issued a substantial discount that drove increased sales last quarter, it would be hard to tell if it was that discount or your training that had the impact.

Identify data sources

An obvious starting point for evaluating the effectiveness of your training is to look at reports from your learning management system (LMS). Unfortunately, most LMS reports are notoriously hard to interpret. 

But if you’re using an all-in-one training system like Rise, you’ll find reports are easy to pull yourself and even easier to parse. Reports in Rise can help you look at different dimensions of training performance, such as who’s completed their assigned training and when, as well as how well your target audience did on their assigned courses (e.g., quiz scores).

Here’s a quick summary of the types of reports available to you in Rise:

• Activity reports give you an easy way to see who’s taking training and when.
• Learner reports help you gauge how your learners are progressing with and performing on their training.
• Course reports give you a deeper understanding of how learners are engaging with individual courses.
• And learning path reports provide a bird’s-eye view of all the learning paths in your account, how learners are progressing through them, and how each course and learner is performing. 

Job performance data

Another vital source of information for measuring the effectiveness of your workforce training are the systems your organization uses to track job performance. For salespeople, this might be something like a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that tracks leads as they’re nurtured through the sales funnel.

One way to better understand the nuances of employee performance is to compare training scores to job performance. For instance, if you recently put your salespeople through sales process refresher training, did the people who scored well in those courses also close more sales? What conclusions can you draw about how well your training upskilled those salespeople?

More examples of how to measure various KPIs

We’ve provided a few examples of ways to measure common KPIs, but let’s dive into a couple more:

Time and money saved

If the goal of your training was to save time and money, then you’ll want to measure whether your training’s tips and techniques for working more efficiently actually did save time and money.

To do this, you can compare the time it took people to complete tasks before training to how much time they spent on the same task after training. 

Then, multiply time saved by the value of that time (i.e., the average salary of your workers) to determine how much money your training saved the company.

More sales revenue

Let’s say you’ve delivered sales training with the goal of driving more revenue. 

To calculate this out, start by figuring out the average sales per day for the learners you’ve trained. Then, calculate the impact of your training on sales numbers by measuring the average dollar amount of sales per person before and after the training.

Subtract the before numbers from the after numbers to determine how much the sales increased. 

Better accuracy and quality

In some orgs, training is all about increasing product accuracy or quality. If that’s a goal for your training, you’ll want to show that employees are reducing their error rates after completing your course. 

For example, let’s say that before training, your assembly line workers were averaging 15 product assembly errors per day. You create a training course that focuses on improving your workers’ accuracy. Once you’ve pulled reports to confirm they’ve completed training, then you can measure the average amount of errors each worker has made since their training. To measure the impact of the training, you’d need to subtract the average number of errors post-training from the average number of errors pre-training.

Let’s wrap it up

We’ve covered a lot here, so let’s summarize a few key points:

• Before you create training, consider how you’ll measure your training’s effectiveness. That way, you’re sure to develop courses that actually support your company’s business objectives and impact the bottom line.

• The key to measuring the effectiveness of your training is to identify data sources for measuring training and job performance and to think about which data points you’ll need to compare to draw the right conclusions. 

• For analyzing training performance metrics, you can’t beat an all-in-one training system like Rise. Rise makes training simple to distribute, track, and analyze—and the reports are easy enough for anyone to interpret.

• As you’re looking at job performance metrics, don’t forget to factor in outside influences that might skew your data.

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