5 Learning and Development Questions You Can’t Answer Without Analytics

Learning is a key part of work, and science says it will continue to be vital in the workplace of the future.

Without strong Learning and Development (L&D) programs, employees may have a harder time being productive, moving up in the organization, and contributing to financial performance. Additionally, it can also lead to lower employee engagement and increased turnover.

Despite the clear positive effects of learning, I’ve repeatedly heard from L&D leaders that they lack insights into whether what they do impacts overall business goals.

Without this capability, L&D is seen as an overhead rather than a competitive advantage. As Dan Lovely, Chief Learning Officer at AIG, put it: “We are in the skill building business. That need is greater than it has ever been before. For a long time many companies have talked about ‘people as our greatest asset’, but it is becoming a reality more than ever before. How could people not see the value of learning and development?”

So what is holding people back from seeing L&D’s value? L&D teams are struggling to measure the effectiveness of training outcomes.

Analytics is critical to the measurement process, yet according to a survey of L&D organization from Bersin by Deloitte, only 10 percent of survey participants say they are “very effectively able” to use data and analytics to respond to shifting or time-sensitive business needs – and the research shows that L&D’s reliance on Learning Management Systems (LMS) is to blame.

Learning Management Systems Can’t Do Learning Analytics

The LMS is a foundational system for most L&D organizations, and 64% of them consider custom LMS reports or dashboards “the most useful tool” for tracking, measuring, and evaluating learning.

Unfortunately, while an LMS is fairly good “at providing metrics such as learner satisfaction, enrollments, cost of training, and learner demographics, few are able to capture data that is useful outside of the L&D function.” Additionally, “L&D providers rate their L&D applications as useful in tracking and monitoring learning and delivering content, but less useful at reporting and analyzing.”

The lack of analytics support in current L&D tools prevents learning organizations from being more efficient, developing stronger relationships with clients and business leaders, and proactively providing the business with better data for decision-making.

And this will only become more difficult to achieve as L&D functions modernize and incorporate new learning methods and devices into their technology stack, further complicating the process of tracking since most LMS’s can’t combine data from other systems in reporting outputs.

Without a complete picture, the L&D organization is hard pressed to answer the most important questions to their success, such as:

1. Does L&D make our employees stay?

With voluntary resignations at an all-time high and unemployment rates historically low, employee retention is a key objective for most organizations. L&D can address this problem because “when employees perceive that their organizations encourage career development, they feel more confident about their long-term career path.” In fact, a Culture Amp study found that people who stay with an organization are 24% more likely to say that they have had access to the learning and development they needed.