Measuring Impact and ROI: How a Corporate LMS Helps You Get Started

Your learning and development (L&D) program is one of the most effective tools in your toolkit when it comes to remaining competitive in the talent market and increasing the likelihood of retaining top talent. The use of learning management systems (LMSs) is integral to these programs, as it broadens the potential scope of teaching and addresses many challenges related to measuring the impact and ROI of training initiatives.

This blog post will delve into how impact and ROI relate to learning, offering beginner insights and helping you maximize results by effectively measuring and leveraging the capabilities of your corporate LMS.

Understanding Impact in Corporate Training

In a corporate training context, your impact is the practical result of implementing a training program to achieve specific goals. So, to measure impact you must assess progress toward these goals.

For example, in a sales department, a training program may be implemented to equip staff with various tactics for closing deals. If we compare the sales results before and after the implementation of the training program and observe an increase in sales afterward, we can make a compelling case that the training has made a contribution.

However, that's only scratching the surface. Measuring impact also involves identifying the various factors that influence these results. This is where an LMS becomes crucial, as it can offer analytics tools to monitor users' behavior during training.

This may include analyzing the time it takes for workers to begin delivering results after completing a program, or determining which courses were taken by the top-performing workers. All data relevant to the achievement of goals becomes part of the process of measuring the impact of a training program.

What About Return on Investment (ROI)?

ROI is defined as the ratio between the return or profit and the investment made. Since many corporate goals aim to drive profit, measuring the impact of training programs also helps you assess ROI. In the previous example, if the sales department increases its closed deals, the profit can be calculated after deducting the investment made in the training program.

However, the relationship between training and returns won’t always be so direct. For example, in the onboarding process, an LMS can provide basic training to new hires and serve as a repository they can consult at any time. This eliminates the need to constantly reach out to managers for answers.

So how do you prove ROI in this scenario? You can conduct interviews with managers to determine if the use of the LMS has reduced the need for guidance for new hires. If the answer is “yes”, and managers can allocate more time to their own tasks, it can be concluded that there’s been a “return” in terms of productivity.

The LMS can also track information on which employees have completed their programs and how frequently they consult the information. If a manager has to spend less time assisting employees who can be shown to be regular users of the LMS, the correlation between LMS implementation and successful onboarding becomes clearer.

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4 Key Metrics to Track in Your LMS When Measuring Impact and ROI

It’s important to keep in mind the following metrics to ensure that your training efforts are yielding positive results:

1. Employee Performance

Corporate training goals are typically aimed at improving performance, so it’s crucial to measure performance after implementation to quantify training effectiveness.

The specific method for measuring performance will vary depending on the learner’s department. Sales are one common metric, but other departments may be measured by the time it takes to deliver products to clients or even the ratio of resolved and unresolved conflicts among staff. Using an LMS allows you to track the specific resources used by employees to identify which courses have the greatest influence on performance.

2. Participation Rates

Implementing an LMS and building a comprehensive catalog of training programs is a considerable investment—you don’t want all your effort to go to waste. That’s why it’s crucial for companies to develop a communication plan that raises awareness of the new tool and encourages employee participation.

Participation serves as the metric for measuring usage of this resource, and fortunately, it’s one of the basic data points that an LMS can collect. Learning analytics allows you to track:

• Who accesses the system
• When they access the system
• How much time they spend
• What activities they engage in
  

By extracting and analyzing this data across all users, you can gain an overview of how many workers are truly leveraging your investment.

3. Knowledge Retention

It’s important to measure the extent to which workers retain knowledge after completing their training. You can rely on evaluations to assess what’s been learned and how it’s being applied. Certifications with expiration dates help establish a formalized method to ensure workers refresh and maintain their knowledge. Dependable LMSs will provide the option to manage and monitor these certificates, notifying you and your learners when renewal is necessary.

4. User Feedback

Gathering feedback from workers will help you identify which resources are effective and which aren’t, enabling managers and facilitators to make necessary improvements to enhance training programs. Additionally, user feedback raises your own awareness of harder-to-measure benefits that basic analytics typically don’t measure.

An LMS also enables administrators to collect information through collaborative forums or by implementing surveys, polls, or satisfaction scores within activities. Subsequently, it can leverage its analytics features to present the information in a visually organized manner.

4 Ways to Maximize Impact and ROI With an LMS

Following this advice will help you improve your results when leveraging an LMS to enhance your training program:

1. Establish Clear Objectives and KPIs

It’s essential to have well-defined general goals to effectively measure any progress in training. Then, when developing specific goals for the training program, ensure they’re aligned correctly with these overarching objectives.

An LMS is meant to enhance and facilitate the learning process: it does not replace strategic planning and analysis. It builds upon your previously established KPIs and aids in their measurement and tracking.

2. Prioritize Well-Designed Content

Many LMSs provide tools that assist instructors in creating training materials. However, it’s important to remember to always adhere to instructional design principles as they help craft learning content aimed at maximizing knowledge retention. The better the content, the more effective the results will be.

If you’re not an instructional designer and lack someone it that role in your business, you can rely on specialized third-party services to assist you. Open LMS’s Content Services team is always up-to-date with new trends and best practices, and they’re available for all your instructional design needs, whether you want to evaluate your existing content or create it from scratch.

Alternatively, you can choose to purchase off-the-shelf courses from instructional libraries. If you go down this route, ensure that the content isn’t overly generic and that it truly meets your company's specific needs.

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3. Make Sure You’re Set Up for Continuous Measurement

Maintaining consistency in measurement prevents you from falling behind on the necessary changes required to realign actions with company objectives. It also ensures that the correlation between investments and positive outcomes (ROI) is always evident to stakeholders, thereby promoting use of the LMS.

LMSs may not measure all necessary metrics by default, so ensure they have good integration capabilities that leverage powerful analytics extensions such as IntelliBoard and Ease Learning.

4. Ensure Your LMS Offers Ongoing Support

Providing ongoing technical support is essential to ensure that learning isn’t interrupted by bugs or conflicts within the LMS. At Open LMS, we train administrators and empower them to provide support for queries big and small. We also offer 24/7 support to assist with any situations that arise, regardless of their complexity.

Always check your LMS’s feature list to ensure that it uses a dependable hosting provider such as Amazon Web Services. This will enhance overall security and reduce the risk of platform crashes and data loss.