How to harness the power of your training data for business impact

Activity metrics are a necessary part of learning and development programs. They capture the data points that give training teams a top-level view of learner engagement. Learning analytics go deeper. They connect activity metrics to business-critical objectives. With activity metrics, you can tell that a new onboarding course had a high attendance rate, but did it really impact employee turnover? When business and learning systems are connected, it’s possible to tell that story with learning analytics, and even pinpoint where action needs to be taken. With a training operations platform, which connects training data to business data in one system, this type of analysis is possible.

Digital transformation has impacted the very way of life for human beings, which means it has impacted the ways in which we do business. Training often sits at the intersection of new organizational objectives to reach audiences – whether they’re customers, employees, or partners – in a world that is evolving digitally. In order to understand if those learning initiatives are successful, enterprise training requires a deeper level of reporting. This type of reporting has been accessible to other sectors of the business, but until now it’s been largely out of reach for training teams. It’s now more important than ever to understand the direct correlation between training outcomes and organizational objectives, and with business intelligence tools for training that is possible.

With learning analytics, we’ve seen training and development teams pinpoint the causes and stressors of employee turnover, and reduce it by 55%. We’ve also seen enterprise training leaders demonstrate a 10% reduction in annual training costs by optimizing constraints in the training approval workflow. We’ve even seen L&D teams showcase a 10x increase in annual revenue through partner streams by demonstrating the value of a marked decrease in manual operations. The point is, with learning analytics it’s possible to tell a different story than just who took the training, how much they liked the course, and the value they think they’ll get out of the training. You can actually showcase the business value learners receive from the training.