Having a knowledgeable and skilled workforce is often the key to business success. Without a commitment to continuous training and lifelong learning, ensuring your employees have the information and tools necessary to outperform the competition is challenging. Fortunately, eLearning makes cultivating a capable workforce simple.
Here’s a look at how online training supports organizational success.
How Does eLearning Help Businesses?
eLearning is beneficial to businesses for several reasons. First, online training is a convenient approach to continuing education in the workplace. Companies don’t have to coordinate in-person sessions. Instead, employees participate at times that are convenient to them, ensuring organizational productivity. Plus, learners can proceed at their own pace, allowing those who need more time the flexibility to adjust their approach.
Second, eLearning courses allow businesses to create tailored training programs that align with organizational goals. They can focus the coursework on critical skill areas, allowing them to close knowledge gaps quickly and efficiently.
eLearning is also highly engaging, as it can support interactive elements to support greater active participation. Younger generations, in particular, prefer the format, as these digital natives are highly tech-savvy. However, older members of the workforce also benefit from the eLearning approach, as the coursework is designed to be straightforward and accessible.
Finally, online training is a budget-friendly approach. It typically costs far less than providing in-person, instructor-led courses to a substantial number of employees. There are no travel costs for attendance. Plus, eLearning courses are reusable and can remain accessible as long as the content stays relevant.
How Do eLearning Consultants Measure the Results of Online Training
Securing the strongest possible return on investment (ROI) when offering online training to employees is a common goal for businesses. Fortunately, by partnering with experienced eLearning consultants,
achieving a high ROI is straightforward.
eLearning consultants are learning and development (L&D) experts who harness their expertise to help companies create engaging, useful, and skill-building online courses. Additionally, they use a multi-faceted approach designed to ensure that eLearning helps organizations achieve their workforce-boosting goals.
Here is a look at how eLearning consultants measure online training results.
L&D Consultants Begin with Assessing Performance Levels
An eLearning consulting firm’s first step is to assess starting performance levels. Essentially, they gather data to create a baseline, allowing them to evaluate the impact of the online training created for an organization more effectively.
During this stage, eLearning consultants identify critical success metrics related to workforce performance. Precisely what that entails varies by organization, as each company has unique key performance indicators (KPIs) related to their industry, goals, workforce composition, and other factors.
The assessment process can also pinpoint organizational eLearning needs. For example, it can identify productivity bottlenecks, skill gaps, and similar issues that are prime targets for improvement. With that information, learning and development consulting professionals can provide targeted recommendations to businesses looking to boost productivity, efficiency, and profitability, ensuring their future online training is appropriately focused on areas that offer the most overall value.
Additionally, eLearning consultants can compare potential eLearning needs to broader organizational goals. Through that process, they ensure that any offered online training aligns with organizationally significant objectives, further boosting the ROI.
Create a Formal Skills Assessment
Along with analyzing the current workforce performance level, learning and development consulting professionals create formal skills assessments to tailor online training further. Through the evaluations, eLearning consultants can identify skill gaps with greater accuracy, making it easier to determine which knowledge areas should feature strongly in the program.
Additionally, consultants can pinpoint existing workforce strengths through formal skills assessments. By doing so, any online training can bypass skill areas where employees already meet or exceed expectations. With that approach, eLearning programs become far more efficient. Plus, it keeps the content engaging, as employees don’t have to rehash information that’s already highly familiar and within their comfort zones.
The created skills assessments are also valuable after the training program is launched. Companies can see precisely how their knowledge level and functional ability changed by having employees retake the assessments after completing the eLearning course. Determining the overall ROI is simple, as companies will have clear data demonstrating workforce development and growth.
Leverage Analytics Data to Track Performance Engagement
Analytics are an excellent tool for assessing how employee engagement shifts after participating in a company-provided eLearning program. An eLearning consulting firm can help businesses identify KPIs related to a workforce’s success. Then, data collection before offering the training shows the current state of employee performance, essentially serving as a starting point for future comparison.
After providing employees with the created online training, the learning and development consulting firm can use analytics to reassess employee performance. Companies then have an easy way to assess the success of their eLearning program, as KPI improvements represent upticks in engagement, efficiency improvements, and productivity increases.
Moving forward, monitoring analytics data to track performance engagement can provide more powerful insights regarding long-term ROI. Continuing productivity gains often occur long after training is complete. Typically, those increases occur as employees become more comfortable with their new knowledge and skills. As a result, ongoing data collection shows organizations how much they’ve gained by offering eLearning.
Provide Satisfaction Surveys
Satisfaction surveys created by eLearning consultants allow learners to provide feedback regarding their experience. Since high engagement during online training positively impacts knowledge retention, gathering employee insights helps companies assess their eLearning program’s success.
Businesses can collect survey responses before and after launching their eLearning program for comparative data. The initial survey gathers information on how employees perceive the previous training model, giving the organization a baseline. Then, the later surveys gauge how workers feel about the new eLearning approach. Once that data is available, companies can compare the results to learn more about shifts in learner sentiment.
Surveys collected after the launch of an eLearning course also allow businesses to refine their online training. They can look at responses to identify patterns that signal the need for further adjustments. With that, organizations can continuously improve the program, ensuring it meets learners’ needs in the long term.
What Factors Make an eLearning Course Successful?
While having a robust and reliable process for creating an eLearning course is essential, several factors ultimately determine whether the online training is successful. Here is an overview of some of the most impactful ones.
Clear Goals
Before creating eLearning courses, companies must outline clear, specific goals related to workforce improvements. Without well-defined objectives, targeting online training in such a way that it leads to definitive performance and productivity gains in the right areas is difficult. It can result in a mishmash of courses that don’t propel the company forward in a particular direction, and that’s not ideal.
Clear, specific goals provide much-needed focus. It ensures organizations prioritize the courses created to align with a well-defined target. Then, everything moves in a singular direction, significantly increasing the overall odds of success.
Engagement
eLearning programs only succeed if employees remain engaged while participating in the online training. Fortunately, eLearning provides many opportunities to boost engagement. For example, using multiple formats – text, audio, video, and images – makes the content interesting. Plus, that approach supports a wide array of learning styles, making it easier for any type of learner to connect with the material fully.
Integrating interactive elements is also beneficial for engagement. Quizzes and interactive scenarios are both worth adding. Having collaborative features to make the learning process social is another solid option. Companies can also use gamification techniques like reward badges and leaderboards to keep engagement high.
Using a micro-learning approach is another highly effective strategy. With micro-learning, larger concepts are broken up into bite-sized chunks, making the content more digestible. Plus, it helps keep course lengths shorter, making fitting training into tighter schedules easier.
Performance Improvements
Ultimately, performance improvements are an undeniable marker of an eLearning course’s success. Using the assessment strategies outlined above, companies can gauge whether critical KPIs move in the right direction after offering online training. Additionally, it ensures they can easily see the value their eLearning program provides.
Need Assistance with Designing an eLearning Course? Partner with the Best Learning and Development Consulting Firm-Clarity Consultants
Designing a top-quality eLearning course requires L&D expertise. At Clarity Consultants, our on-demand eLearning Development Consultants make creating your ideal training program simple. Our solutions provide companies with the eLearning coursework they need, allowing them to focus on their other responsibilities while benefitting from an informed, skilled, and engaged workforce.
When you partner with Clarity Consultants, our team works with you to identify your talent development objectives and bring your goals to life. For more than 30 years, Clarity Consultants has supported organizations of all sizes and across various industries, giving our team unique insights that ensure we meet and exceed client expectations.
Want to learn more about what Clarity Consultants has to offer? Head to our
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