Your online learning program has the power to boost engagement and enable your users to become more successful. This translates to all kinds of different business wins, like improved retention, a higher bottom line and increased rates of customer advocacy (among many other benefits).

However, it’s nearly impossible to reach benefits like these unless you have a way of measuring your learning program’s impact, like a training effectiveness index formula. Without full visibility, you have no way of making informed adjustments to your e-learning strategy. You would probably have a mix of successes and failures, but it would be difficult to capitalize on the successes or correct the failures. By paying attention to important learning KPIs (key performance indicators), you can gain the insights you need to steer your organization's online learning strategy in the right direction.

There are many different ways to approach online learning at your company. Not every strategy is the right choice for every business. This means you will likely have to do the best you can based on your research and then make adjustments after your courses are live. Furthermore, online education best practices are not static — they evolve with the industry, and you’ll need to have a way of determining which old ideas are no longer working and which new ones are.

Elearning KPIs can enable you to make informed decisions about your organization’s courses. You can use key performance indicators to identify which parts of your strategy are working and which parts need to be adjusted. After you’ve made the adjustments, you can review the relevant KPIs to see what kind of impact your changes had.

This iterative process of improvement and measurement is integral to creating an effective user education program. Let’s explore some of the best key performance indicators you can track to learn more about your user education outcomes.

How To Measure Training Effectiveness

Before you can understand how to measure training effectiveness, you need a way to define success. Your e-learning program could have many different kinds of goals. First, you need to consider the difference between business goals and training goals. 

Training goals are the objectives you have in mind for learners who use your online learning resources. For example, enabling a customer to use a specific feature of your software successfully could be a training goal. Business goals are the outcomes you are targeting for your business. An example of a business goal is improving customer retention.

Once you know what your goals are for your user education strategy, you can select the best KPIs to measure your progress. We’ve compiled a list of some of the most important online learning KPIs to help you understand how to measure training effectiveness. Metrics like these are some of the best benchmarks for determining whether or not your e-learning program is successful.

Time to Proficiency

Time to proficiency is the amount of time it takes a learner to reach a certain level of proficiency using your online courses. The faster your users can gain the skills and knowledge they need to be successful, the faster your organization can start reaping the rewards of a highly competent user base.

Retention

Completing courses quickly doesn’t do very much good if your learners forget everything they learned in a day or two. It’s human nature to quickly forget information when we’re presented with a large amount of it in a short period of time. To help your users retain what your courses are teaching them, try breaking up courses into bite-sized chunks so that learners have a chance to put what they’re learning into practice one step at a time.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is another important component of a thorough training KPI formula. When new employees are fully engaged with your organization’s training content, there are two benefits: employees are more likely to perform their jobs well and they’re more likely to feel supported with adequate resources. You can use an LMS with learning analytics features to track how actively your employees are engaging with training materials and other learning content.

Net Promoter Score

Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend your business to other people. Your existing customers can often be your best advocates, and keeping them satisfied is one of the fastest routes to new customers. Measuring Net Promoter Score is a simple matter of asking customers to rate how likely they are to recommend your business on a scale of one to ten. Customers who have access to effective training materials are usually the most likely to understand your product or service well enough to recommend it to others. If you’re measuring the NPS of your education program specifically, you would ask users to rate how likely they are to recommend your training courses to others.

KPI For Training Manager

One of the toughest challenges for user training managers is getting buy-in from company leadership. Executives sometimes mistakenly think user education is not particularly important, and unfortunately, it’s often first on the list of budget cuts. E-learning KPIs for managers are more than just valuable business insights — they’re the best weapons available for convincing leadership that user education has a meaningful impact.

One of the best ways to make the benefits of user education clear is with KPIs that demonstrate the other areas of the business that are being negatively affected by lack of training. If lack of training is causing employees to perform their jobs poorly, you can demonstrate this consequence with the right KPI. For training managers, the key is to draw a clear line between current negative business outcomes and lack of investment in user education.

User education is a subject that’s often neglected altogether or treated as a low priority, but a successful user education program can actually provide a lot of value to a business. Learning KPIs are some of the best tools for convincing company leadership that user education is, in fact, worthwhile.

KPI For Learning Management System

There is no single “Most important KPI.” For learning management system users, it’s possible to track a wide variety of learning KPIs. The most important metrics are the ones that relate to your organization’s specific business goals for its current e-learning initiative. 

Even once you’ve settled on the right KPIs to measure, you still need a way to actually track those metrics. A learning management system (LMS) is one of the best kinds of tools for measuring a training and development KPI. Examples or learning management systems like Northpass have built-in features to aid with learning analytics so you can easily track important KPIs.

Without a dedicated software platform to unify your e-learning operations, it’s extremely challenging to accurately and efficiently measure the impact of your learning content. An LMS can help by bringing all the metrics together into a single training KPI dashboard that gives you full visibility into learner-level insights. With all these insights collected in one convenient location, you can use them to make quick, well-informed decisions about your company’s online learning strategy.

When you’re evaluating the best LMS to use for tracking e-learning analytics, you should once again consider the specific needs of your e-learning program. For example, take into account which group or groups you’re targeting with your program. You should also think about your program’s training goals and business goals. Try to think of a sample KPI for training and development that’s relevant to your organization’s e-learning objectives and research learning management systems that can help you track that metric.

Examples Of KPIs For Learning And Development

Here are a few more examples of KPIs for learning and development you should consider:

Course Completion Rate

Course completion rate is a great KPI to monitor if you want to determine the quality of the experience learners are having while taking your courses. Along with similar metrics like average time to completion, course completion rate can tell you a lot about which courses your users are succeeding with and which they’re struggling with. This can be valuable insight as you determine where to focus your efforts and resources.

Certification Rate

Awarding certifications to users who complete certain courses is a great way to boost learner engagement. It’s also an effective way to track how much value your users are getting from your courses. Certification metrics can tell you which proficiencies are in the highest demand by your users and help you plan for what kind of courses and certifications you’ll offer in the future. You can also use re-certification metrics to find out how many of your learners get enough value from your courses that they come back and recertify after their first certification expires.

Survey Results

Surveys provide another answer to the question “how to measure training effectiveness.” Questionnaires are some of the very best indicators of the kinds of experiences your learners are having. By including a short survey at the end of a course or series of courses, you can look for patterns and identify common pain points. You can get hard, quantitative data by asking survey respondents to answer yes or no questions or rate aspects of their learning experiences on a scale of one to ten. You can also gather qualitative information by asking respondents to describe certain aspects of their learning experiences in words.

These are only a few of the KPIs that could be relevant to your user education strategy. Hopefully, these training metrics examples can serve as a useful starting point as you learn more about how to use online learning KPIs.