Four Essential LMS Reporting Features Your Team Needs

Comprehensive reporting tools within your learning platform equip your Learning and Development (L&D) teams with vital data on matters critical to the business, including the impact of training on performance and productivity. Without relevant data, evaluating the success of your company’s learning and development strategies can prove challenging.

When assessing the impact of training efforts, a data-driven approach is critical. Periodic or ongoing evaluation of learning initiatives allows your organization to stay agile and responsive to the evolving needs of your workforce and market demands.

Selecting an LMS that includes comprehensive reporting tools to automate as much of this process as possible is essential. Here are four LMS reporting features to consider.

Pre-Built Report Templates

Pre-built report templates save L&D professionals time and effort. Rather than starting from scratch each time you need to generate a report, these templates provide a ready-made structure with predefined fields and data categories. This accelerates the reporting process and ensures consistency and standardization across different reports. With the time saved, your team can focus on analyzing data and deriving actionable insights.

Furthermore, pre-built templates are designed with best practices in mind. They often incorporate industry standards and key performance indicators relevant to learning and talent development. You don’t have to worry about creating a report that might miss valuable metrics—these templates serve as expertly curated roadmaps to measuring the effectiveness of training programs, leaving less room for oversight.

Customized and Ad-Hoc Reports

L&D programs vary widely between companies, and one-size-fits-all templates may not always capture the nuanced aspects of training. While pre-built templates are great for most situations, some circumstances may require more specific data. Your LMS should also allow authorized users to create custom reports whenever needed.

Customizable LMS reports offer advantages that can be just as crucial as pre-built templates. These reports give organizations the flexibility to tailor reports to their unique needs and evolving objectives. They also enable organizations to focus on the metrics that directly impact their strategies, ensuring that the data they gather is in sync with their business priorities. This alignment allows for more precise evaluation of training effectiveness and a sharper focus on areas for improvement.

Scheduling

Between reports for senior executives with high-level results to compliance reports for the HR team and ongoing reports about training activity for team leaders, managing the delivery of all this data can become a job in itself. With a suitable LMS, L&D admins can schedule different reports to be delivered directly to the inboxes of various stakeholders at recurring intervals, like per month or quarter.

Scheduled automated reports deliver data and insights when they are needed without delays. They provide L&D professionals and stakeholders across the organization with up-to-date information on training progress, learner performance, and program effectiveness.

Stakeholders who receive scheduled reports can then proactively identify trends, issues, or performance gaps—allowing them to address problems promptly, adjust training strategies, and provide additional support to employees where necessary.

Business Impact Reports

Timely access to data enables quicker responses to emerging challenges, allowing business leaders to make data-driven decisions in real-time. An LMS that offers insight into the impact of learning on real-world outcomes, like sales and customer satisfaction, can help your organization make informed decisions around resources, course adjustments, and training program enhancements.

A few things to look out for when considering an LMS are the integrations available, as you’ll likely need to transfer and share data between the LMS and third-party applications to glean useful information. With the right integrations, companies can determine exactly how learning is measured against the KPIs that matter most to the business and begin collecting data that counts. From there, you can set up dashboards with at-a-glance information and data visualizations that show how employee training activity fuels business performance.

By tracking and analyzing learning performance data through these major LMS reporting features, your organization can understand precisely how training initiatives impact individual and team performance. With this knowledge, stakeholders can strategize to ensure that learning and development efforts align with overall organizational goals, ultimately resulting in a more agile and competitive workforce.

Want to learn more about how to measure the impact of learning? Check out our eBook: The ROI of Online Training. It features a new way to look at eLearning ROI that aims at connecting the dots between training data and business data.