Measurements: One of the Toughest Challenges in Training

We come across many learning executives who still struggle to obtain meaningful metrics that would support decision making and exhibit the business impact of the investment made in training. In fact, in our most recent training challenges survey, 78% of respondents said the biggest weakness in their current reporting was providing information to support business planning and strategy.

Some of the other major obstacles encountered are data accuracy, lack of data, data standardization, time constraints, and data access.

A lot of companies look to their LMS to solve their learning measurement challenge. But, our survey found that 84% of respondents were dissatisfied with their training reporting.  Respondents cited limited standardized reporting, learning technology integration issues, customization requirements, and usability as the primary areas of dissatisfaction.

It is not fair to blame all measurement problems on LMS technology. In our first Learning Intelligence Forum, learning executives were concerned about the difficulties of measuring informal learning, the need to efficiently correlate performance and learning, and the technical challenges involved in pulling data from multiple sources, such as HR and CRM systems.

We believe efficient, effective, and meaningful metrics are essential for successful training operations management.  And we believe there’s a dearth of information and resources about this important topic. By facilitating discussions, gathering market data, sharing our experiences, and offering informational resources, we hope to do our part in moving the industry forward.

I’d love to hear from you about your training measurement programs or if you don’t have one our learning strategy consultants can help you build one.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com

Centralize Services, Not Processes – Another way to trim the cost of your training programs

Another way to trim the cost of your training programs is to centralize your training support, but not your processes.

Let me explain.

First of all, we can probably all agree that decentralized administration is inefficient.

It becomes a problem when there are multiple administrators in multiple groups completing the same tasks or transactions, but doing it in multiple ways. Various groups within an organization have differences in their processes and procedures, such as registration requirements or course description details. But often these differences are driven by lack of bandwidth or minimal training.

Take as an example the process of uploading courses to an LMS. If an organization has various people doing this, it’s common to see different administrators using different course-naming schemes and course descriptions. The result is that it’s difficult for users to find courses, for managers to assign courses to their employees, and for anyone to get reliable reports out of the system. This becomes a serious hindrance to good reporting, auto-enrollment and competency management. The resulting issues can be very costly, both in the short and long term.

So, centralization of learning support is critical, which goes without saying.

On the flipside, it’s not a good idea to develop inflexible processes that don’t adapt to the needs of your customers, the business units. Be careful about trying to eliminate customized support that they’ve grown accustomed to. Dissatisfaction quickly rises when executives feel their needs and interests are not heard, considered, and acted upon.

Establishing a decentralized approach to customer learning support is that business units have adequate control over employee learning and can tailor all aspects of learning to the specific needs of their employees.  Long term, you get ever closer to the elusive goal of aligning learning with business objectives.

To learn more about the concept of Centralized Services and Decentralized Processes, download the white paper.

For more information on this topic and the nine ways to trim operational expense, please download the recent webinar or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at http://www.trainingefficiency.com/.

If your organization wants to increase the efficiency of your learning technology or training processes, contact us.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com

Consolidate & Centralize Your Learning Technologies

When you consolidate and reduce the number of your company’s learning systems, a cumulative positive effect is spread across the entire training organization.

There will be fewer system support requirements, less maintenance, fewer patches, fewer resource requirements, fixes and upgrades. In addition, you’ll need fewer people with technology skill sets, which helps to reduce support costs. The bonus benefit is your reporting will become easier, which will lead to better learning measurements.

In our experience, there are two main challenges to the consolidation and centralization of learning technology:
1. Deciding what to do with legacy data
2. How to meet the functional requirements of varying business units

With regard to legacy data, there are several options. Assuming you have the ability to keep your legacy systems, you can migrate users to new systems and build data integration into your stable legacy systems. Users can still access the data, but you won’t have to go through a big data migration effort, which can be time consuming and expensive.

If you have to go through a data migration effort, which is usually accompanied by a significant amount of data clean up, it makes sense to conduct a data audit and do some systems analysis up front.

The second big challenge is how to meet the functional requirements of various groups across your organization. More and more training departments are leveraging newer technologies and approaches by building LMS functionality OUTSIDE of their LMS, in the form of portals and widgets. This approach allows you to customize to the needs of those diverse business units and significantly improve the user experience.
For more tips, check out our recent webinar recording or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at www.TrainingEfficiency.com.

If your organization is considering an LMS consolidation or if you’re interested in increasing the efficiency of your learning technology infrastructure, contact us.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com