Learning and development (L&D) plays a pivotal role in an organization’s success. Without proper training, even highly skilled employees can’t make the most of their abilities because they simply don’t have a clear path ahead. L&D programs are the tools you need to steer everyone in the right direction.
However, simply asking L&D teams to develop lots of training courses for employees to complete won’t be enough. Your training needs to be relevant, goal-oriented, and, most importantly, effective. Efficiency is precisely what we’re going to focus on as it translates into determining the impact of your training programs.
Measuring training efficiency all comes down to using the right tools. With a good learning management system (LMS), you’re on the right track. These tools incorporate all the analytics you need to measure your course engagement and results.
You can understand how well your L&D efforts are unfolding by looking at different aspects such as acquired competencies, the difficulties most learners face, or the time spent in training.
Let’s explore five LMS analytics for L&D that can help you optimize your training efforts and achieve better results in line with your organization’s goals.
Why use LMS analytics?
Effective training is essential for the well-being of employees and organizations alike. In fact, 68 percent of employees believe training and development is the most important company policy. Here are the main advantages you can gain by offering employees valuable, data-driven training programs:
- Improved operational performance: the ultimate goal of training is to improve people’s job-related skills, which boosts their performance, motivation, and work satisfaction. Effective training can achieve this, but it requires constant results monitoring;
- Increased employee engagement and retention: in a competitive market where 25 percent of companies lose up to 60 percent of their workforce within a year, striving to engage employees through effective training is essential. Efficient onboarding training alone can account for a 25 percent retention rate increase;
- Optimized training strategies: a better understanding of how efficient your training is enables the L&D team to optimize their work by focusing on strategies that yield good results instead of wasting time with those that don’t. Moreover, tracking training progress and outcomes boosts L&D teams’ work satisfaction by helping them realize the positive impacts of their efforts.
By leveraging the power of analytics, you can achieve all of these. If you use an LMS with integrated analytics, you’re halfway there. You just need to pick the right features and start using them.
Top five LMS analytics for L&D
There are many ways in which LMS analytics can help your business. Because these systems boast a large array of features, we’ve put together a list of the most useful and popular ones L&D specialists can rely on.
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Course analytics
LMS course analytics offer lots of valuable insights into how learners engage with your courses. These analytics provide at-a-glance stats on their progress and achievements.
The time each person spends completing a course and the time spent on its individual modules are just some of the insights you can get via course analytics. This enables you to change the course content or length in order to improve your training efficiency.
These analytics also enable you to quickly check what courses are past due or have to be completed in the near future and send trainees automatic reminders in this regard, right from the platform.
Read more: 4 Key LMS analytics every trainer needs to know
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Assessment analytics
You can assess each learner’s progress in various ways with the help of an LMS. Use quizzes, games, or other types of assessments to test their understanding and the knowledge they’ve acquired.
From your LMS, you can also generate score reports to see how each team and individual performed in different assessments and what courses posed the biggest challenges.
The great thing about using an LMS is that you spend little to no time assessing learners. Training games, true/false tests, or quizzes are automatically scored by the platform. Based on the results, you can adapt trainees’ learning paths to help them improve certain skills.
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Mastery analytics
Many LMSs nowadays incorporate mastery analytics. These are linked to the competencies associated with each course. When designing and implementing training courses, L&D specialists can add specific competencies.
For example, a time management course can include competencies related to effective written communication, task scheduling, and priority setting. Once these competencies are added to the course, they correlate with tasks and tests learners have to pass in order to complete it.
These analytics will reveal the level of mastery each person has for each competency based on their results, the number of times they took a test, or the total time spent completing each challenge.
Read more: What’s in store for the future of training: the intelligent learning platform
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Team analytics
Team analytics give you an accurate overview of each group of trainees enrolled in a course. There are different functions and filters you can use to visualize this data.
You can filter the information for a particular course or team and see how many members there are, for how long they’ve been active, what courses they’ve completed or not, who the team leaders are, etc. This at-a-glance information helps save time. You no longer have to use other corporate tools to check these details or contact trainees for this purpose.
Another correlated function is the group feature. This allows you to improve collaboration and communication within a team. You can create different groups in the platform for different training purposes or departments. The related analytics will show what members each group has, when they joined the group, and some of their activities within the group.
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Instructor analytics
If you’re managing an L&D team, you’re probably more involved in overseeing instructors’ work rather than assessing learners’ progress. Rest assured there are plenty of useful LMS analytics for you.
The ones that probably interest you the most are instructor analytics. Just like trainers need to constantly check learners’ attendance and monitor their progress, you need to monitor instructors. By using LMS analytics, this job can come down to a few clicks. The platform quickly lists all the instructors, their courses, or the teams they’re responsible for.
Moreover, you can also check when an instructor last logged in, modified a course, assessed learners, etc. This way, you save a lot of time you would otherwise spend on 1:1 meetings or back and forth emails.
Reporting tools
LMS analytics offer a plethora of information about courses, trainees, and instructors with just a few clicks, but you need more. For example, you also have to compile this data and present it to your managers. Worry not, you don’t have to put together reports manually by accessing all the different analytics.
The LMS does this for you. Most analytics are accompanied by correlated reports. There are two main types of reports you can usually get from an LMS:
- Built-in reports: these are ready-made reports that can vary based on the analytics your platform offers. They provide course attendance, course completion, assessment, scores, course enrolment data, etc.;
- Custom reports: these are customized reports you can create based on the parameters that interest you. For example, in a single report, you can combine information from multiple courses, teams, or instructors.
Read more: Using LMS reports to find pain points in the company’s e-learning programs
Conclusion
LMSs support learner engagement and training efficiency in multiple ways. One of them is through accurate analytics and in-depth reports that provide you the insight you need to improve your training strategy. By using LMS analytics not only do you get a quick overview of how well learners navigate through training courses, you also gain a better understanding of what type of content appeals to them and what challenges they face along their learning paths. Use this knowledge to design better training, the type that boosts competencies, employee satisfaction, and retention.
