7 Learning and Development KPIs You Need to Measure.

Measuring the impact of your L&D is vital. We share the best learning and development KPIs to keep track of.

So, you’ve set live a new learning course.

But how do you know that the training you’ve put in place is having the impact you want?

When you’re investing heavily in your LMS and your learning content, then you need to be sure you’re getting a good return on your investment.

In this blog we’ll cover:

• What are learning and development KPIs?
• Why are they important?
• Which L&D KPIs to track

Let’s get started.

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What are learning and development KPIs?

Learning and development metrics are used to help determine the success of your learning initiatives.

The aim of an L&D metric is to be able to quantify the impact your learning has on your employees.

Related: The best LMS platforms to try

According to the 2021 learning & skills at work report, 80% of respondents reported that their learning strategy aligns with business objectives.

But where people start to fall short, is proving the impact learning has on those objectives.

Why are L&D metrics important?

Learning and development metrics are important for several reasons. First and foremost, they enable you to measure the effectiveness of your learning programmes.

Having, and tracking key metrics gives you a yardstick on which to measure improvement and correlate it back to L&D.

By tracking these metrics, you can identify areas where improvements are needed, and adjust accordingly.

In addition, learning and development metrics can help you justify the investment in learning and to demonstrate its value to stakeholders.

This can be particularly important for organisations that are looking to secure funding or support for their learning and development initiatives.

Last but not least, tracking these metrics keeps organisations competitive when it comes to offering the best learning to support employees to be successful in their roles.

7 learning and development KPIs to track

So now we know the what and the why, it’s time to look at how. How can you best measure your learning and development and which KPIs are the best to track.

A common challenge faced by professionals in L&D is being able to track the efficacy of their learning content.

And it’s no surprise.

Some LMS solutions offer little in the way of reporting and analytics, making data tracking totally manual and often, unmanageable.

💡Pro Tip

Think Learning offers a series of robust reporting tools, using Totara reports alongside bespoke dashboards.

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When it comes to measuring success in learning, we usually split our metrics in two. The first are LMS-related KPIs. And the second are more business-level KPIs.

We generally suggest measuring the following metrics:

1. Course attendance rate
2. Course completion rate
3. Average time to completion
4. Learner satisfaction rate
5. Learner retention rate
6. Job performance impact
7. Training ROI

Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail.

Course attendance rate

If it’s taking you a number of hours to create learning content, then the first step to measuring its success is to look at how many people start the course.

How many people are enrolled into this course on a monthly or yearly basis?

💡Pro Tip

Our audiences feature can automatically enroll employees based on set demographics pulled from your HR tool, saving you time when it comes to managing learners.

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The first step to start quantifying the impact of your learning is to understand how many people are interested in your content.

If small volumes are signing up, then maybe you need to look at marketing, or relevancy.

Course completion rate

Now you know how many employees are signing up for your courses, how many are completing them? And more importantly, how many are passing?

If you’re finding low conversion rates between numbers of people registered to a course to numbers of people completing that course, then you need to address your course content.

Chances are, you need to do a bit of work to make the course more engaging. Or, maybe you just need to work on nudging those users to complete it.

⚙️ Note

We created ThinkNudge, a notification tool that you can use to alert users to new courses, and remind them for existing ones. This is especially useful for compliance and onboarding.

Average time to completion

We all know that training sometimes ends up bottom of the list of priorities. And it’s no surprise, especially in high-demand jobs like healthcare and hospitality.

As such, it’s usually good practice to have an understanding of the time it takes for an employee to complete a course on average.

You might find that by reducing the course length, your course completion goes up.

Learner satisfaction rate

In business, net promoter score (NPS) is used to measure customer satisfaction.

You could adopt a similar method to measure your course promoter score, or your learner satisfaction. This could be as simple as asking if they would recommend the course to a coworker.

Getting a poor result in course satisfaction shows your course might simply not be interesting enough.

You could investigate making your course more engaging to give it more curb appeal.

Learner retention rate

Maybe lots of employees are completing your course and rating them highly. But how well retained is the knowledge they’re gaining?

This metric is a bit trickier to track.

Some easy ways to do it include:

• Incorporating a quiz 1-3 months after the employee has completed the course to see how well they do
• Collecting feedback using a 360 feedback tool to measure how colleagues perceive any changes in behaviour or performance since completing the course
• Being mindful of how people learn and incorporating on-the-job training and learning from peers as part of the course

These can all help you assess the retention rate of your learning content.

Job performance impact

One would expect that when an employee completes a training module, that their job performance will improve.

This is especially so in highly regulated industries where more specialised knowledge is required to carry out certain tasks.

If the course taught a new skill, then you can simply assess how well the employee now performs that task.

If the course has helped improve an existing skill, then you might need to do a bit more work.

A feedback tool is one good way to measure the impact on job performance. After your employee completes their training, you could ask their colleagues or manager for feedback on how their job performance has changed.

This should give you some qualitative data to deduce impact.

Training ROI

The big one. The ROI of learning is highly important to any business.

But it can be difficult to measure.

The measurement for ROI is simple. But attributing a value to the impact of learning is not so easy.

Return on investment = (Net benefit / Cost of training) x 100

Training isn’t cheap so you need to be sure you’re getting value for money.

One way to measure the ROI is to look at the time saved thanks to the training and use that as part of a training ROI calculator.

Or you could use supervisor assessments to quantify improvements and attribute a value.

However you’re measuring your ROI, you need to be sure you’re doing it in a way that is clear and demonstrable.

Start tracking the right L&D metrics

Are you people learning what they need to in order to continue to grow and develop within your company?

Tracking the learning and development KPIs mentioned above could help identify gaps in your learning strategy.

With the right tools in place, you can serve better content to the right people, at the right time.

Think Learning has a whole suite of tools that you can use to create a solution that solves your key challenges. Our team of experts can build a fully bespoke LMS that hits all of your learning and performance needs.

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