How To Measure The ROI Of Online Training
Over the past few years, online training has become a more attractive option for professional development. Online training provides your employees with the flexibility to learn something new or a new skill, whenever they want and wherever they want. There are many online employee training tools that most teams prefer. These include Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs), Learning Management Systems (LMSs), microlearning platforms, video training tools, social networking tools, etc. All these interactive learning platforms for training are extremely useful for onboarding new employees, providing product knowledge, offering just-in-time information to your employees, and so on.
But as an employer, you may be interested to know whether the online training was successful, if learners were satisfied with the training, or if there has been a noticeable increase in sales or revenue. To find answers to such questions, you need to measure the Return On Investment (ROI) of the online training sessions you organized for your employees at your organization.
This article will discuss 4 ways to measure the ROI of the online training provided for your employees.
1. Set Clear Goals For Your Online Training
As L&D professionals, you need to have a training strategy and set clear goals before conducting the online training. For this, you need to involve the managers of all teams like sales, HR, marketing, operations, etc. Meet the leaders across the departments and ask them what the training goals are, what they want to achieve from the training, and what metrics should be measured.
For example, consider the scenario of a retail company with 300 employees. The HR team identified that the annual turnover was high. The L&D team identified that there is no formal onboarding process and suggested to the management that this was the area where online training could help. Then they have designed the online training and delivered it to the employees. After the training, it was found that the employee turnover was reduced by 9% within 6 months. It means that they have successfully achieved the ROI for their online training.
2. Analyze The Course Completion Rates
Course completion rates is another critical indicator of the effectiveness of your online training. To analyze the rates, you can take the number of employees that have been assigned the online training with the number of employees who successfully completed it. Higher course completion rates of 90% or more indicate that your employees are motivated by the training opportunities. Lower rates indicate that your employees lack interest in training or the online training modules are boring.
If employees are not motivated to take up the courses, they will not receive the benefits. Also, if the ROI indicates zero or negative numbers, this shows that your online training was not a successful initiative. In such scenarios, you need to evaluate the needs of your employees and design engaging online training courses appropriately.
3. Learning Analytics Can Offer You Great Insights
Learning analytics provided by most Learning Management Systems and microlearning platforms offer you valuable insights into the time taken by learners to complete a module, how they are progressing through their learning path, at what time they are accessing their online training, and so on. For example, learners may take more time than expected to complete a particular module.
In another example, many learners may not get qualifying marks in certain modules. In such cases, you can evaluate the difficulty level of module or assessment questions and modify them accordingly. This data can help you measure the overall effectiveness of your online training.
4. Evaluate Costs Against Performance Results
You need to measure the ROI of your online training to measure its effectiveness. To calculate the ROI, consider the costs and outcomes or benefits. Costs may include design, development, implementation, LMS hosting costs, and so on.
Benefits may include an increase in the number of projects received, increased productivity of employees, growth in revenue and sales, reduced number of complaints from clients, etc. In all these, consider the items that can be expressed in revenue or monetary terms. Thus, you can evaluate the costs against performance results to get a ratio that tells you whether your online training was effective or if there are any areas of improvement that need to be addressed or focused upon.
Conclusion
Since online training is people-dependent, measuring the effectiveness may not be easy. But modern authoring tools, microlearning platforms, LXPs, and learner analytics have proven that ROI calculations involving human engagement are measurable.
