Learning and Development
Amplify your learning ROI: Harnessing the power of digital learning solutions
Learning and development have always been the key focuses for businesses to stay relevant and competitive. This focus and resource investment in learning and development activities has been steadily increasing since 2015 as the skillsets necessary to survive in today’s market have changed by 25% (with the expectation that this number will double by 2027). Close to 89% of learning and development professionals agree that proactively investing in building employee skills is the fundamental step for being future-ready. As a result, 48% of companies expect more employee training investment.
However, simply investing in digital learning solutions is not enough to stay competitive; you must also track your learning ROI to assess the effectiveness of your learning and development strategies. But measuring ROI in learning and development is easier said than done and needs an in-depth understanding of learning ROI and influencing factors.
Calculating learning ROI
A simplified formula for calculating learning ROI is:
Although it is straightforward to calculate the cost of learning, it can be challenging to determine the exact gain from learning as learning and development activities affect many tangible and intangible variables. However, if you can effectively correlate your learning (or training) data with the business data, you can measure the ROI in learning and development. A few steps that can help you along the way are:
- Define your desired learning outcomes
- Identify the best KPIs to track
- Choose your training performance criteria
- Correlate training performance data with business data
Metrics to measure ROI in learning and development
You can calculate the cost and gain of learning with the help of many tangible (time and resource investment in learning, number of learners, impact on the bottom line, etc.) and intangible (employee confidence, satisfaction, and commitment, improvement in inter- and intra-team dynamics, learner perception, etc.) metrics. Some of the most common and best metrics that can offer you insights into learning ROI are:
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Productivity
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Employee skills
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Employee turnover
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Customer satisfaction
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Financial performance
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Employee engagement
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Company reputation
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Training costs
Measuring productivity gains focuses on factors like the time needed to complete a task, the number of errors, or the number of products (or services) produced per unit of time.
With skill-based digital learning services, you can assess employee skills pre- and post-training to track the effectiveness and impact of training.
Effective training and development opportunities also reflect in higher employee retention. Tracking employee turnover rates can help you assess the impact of these opportunities on your performance and bottom line.
Efficient and skilled employees are fundamental to satisfied customers. Tracking customer satisfaction rates can give you great insights into the efficiency and effectiveness of your employees and the impact of any training initiatives.
Learning and development initiatives directly impact the company’s bottom line via improved efficiency, higher customer satisfaction rates, and improved employee retention. Tracking financial performance is one of the tangible ways to ascertain the effectiveness of learning and development activities and calculate learning ROI.
Adaptive learning platforms and personalised learning experiences can increase employee engagement, motivation, and job satisfaction. You can track these intangible variables with employee surveys and pulse checks.
Digital learning services that help your employees grow can also contribute positively to the company’s reputation via employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and improved productivity. This can not only help you stand out from the competition but make your future-ready as well.
Outsourcing and adopting digital learning platforms can help you implement more efficient and cost-effective learning solutions. These costs, in terms of monetary and time investment, can significantly impact learning ROI.
These are a few examples of many metrics that can help measure ROI in learning and development. You need to define your desired training outcome to identify the metrics and KPIs best suited to your business needs.
Benefits of calculating learning ROI
Despite its challenges, if you succeed in measuring ROI in learning and development, you can clearly see how well your training initiatives work. This can help you gain insights into addressing your skill gaps and be future-ready in the ever-evolving global market. Additionally, calculating learning ROI can also help you:
- Assess the value and effectiveness of your training programs
- Improve your learning and development strategy
- Address skill gap by prioritising future training initiatives
- Understand the impact of training initiatives on the bottom line and justify training investments
If you are struggling to identify the most relevant metrics or measuring ROI in learning and development initiatives, you can outsource parts or the entirety of your training, analytics, and reporting initiatives to leverage the experience of experts.
For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like living organisms will be imperative for business excellence. A comprehensive yet modular suite of services is doing precisely that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
How can Infosys BPM help?
Infosys BPM managed learning services are end-to-end digital learning services encompassing the entire learning value chain. These allow you to deploy a cost-effective global training landscape that aligns with your business strategy. You can easily measure and track your learning ROI and stay competitive in today’s global marketplace.
