All eyes are on learning and development (L&D) professionals to strategically upskill and reskill their businesses’ workforces. After all, the 2022 Workplace Learning Report predicted that “learning and development’s time in the spotlight is just beginning” and the 2023 Workplace Learning Report found that this prediction continues to turn into reality, as the percentage of L&D pros working more closely with leaders has grown significantly year over year.
But as L&D gets more attention from the C-suite, it’s also put under more scrutiny. Company leaders are relying on L&D pros to provide a plan to help engage, retain, upskill, and reskill their workforces. But they’re also counting on L&D to prove that plan is working. Professional development programs can represent a significant investment of both time and money. Traditional metrics — like course completion rates – may not be enough to demonstrate business impact in a way the C-suite will appreciate. So, if not by documenting the number of people who take a course, how exactly do you communicate value and engagement?
What are learning and development metrics, and why do they matter?
Learning and development metrics are how L&D teams measure the effectiveness of their training and development programs. Unlike other departments like sales and marketing, there aren’t traditional learning and development metrics that can clearly demonstrate the kind of ROI the C-suite is looking for.
Since there isn’t a product being sold, teams have usually defaulted to concrete metrics (like employee adoption and utilization rates via license activation, ratio of training registrants, content views, and completion rates). But while these numbers can provide value, they don’t give much in the way of qualitative data. That “soft” impacts — improved retention, culture, and engagement — may be more difficult to quantify, but they mean much more to both the C-suite and the broader team.
Measuring utilization and completion rates tells a company one thing — how frequently users are engaging with their training programs. It doesn’t tell them how effective the training is at improving employee experience or impacting the bottom line. We’d like to think these two things are the same — and in the best case scenarios, they’re certainly correlated. Think of it this way: Utilization doesn’t necessarily mean value. The metrics that really matter measure value first. This helps leaders justify further investments in the programs that are already proven to work.
ROI and learning and development metrics
L&D teams have two main tasks: developing effective, engaging training programs and finding ways to directly tie the results of their programs to improved revenue. The metrics you choose to measure should help tell both stories. After all, every leader needs to be able to make a business case for every investment. L&D programs are a smart move, but they are often the first line items on the chopping block when budgets are in review. Knowing the right metrics to watch can help you keep them funded and prioritized when resources get tight.
1. How quickly new hires get up to speed
The faster you can get new hires up to speed, the better it will be for your company. And L&D plays an essential role in onboarding new hires.
This is easier to track for some positions than others. For example, getting new hires up to speed in customer service positions can be relatively straightforward — once a person can handle customers on their own, many managers would consider them fully onboarded. Conversely, for a more nebulous position (like a product marketer), it might be harder to track when that employee is fully up to speed. Your best bet is to work with managers to figure out a reliable metric here.
Either way, if you can start tying your development program to new hires becoming productive quickly, you’ll have a clear line under some concrete financial gains.
2. Employee retention
Retaining employees leads to a more effective workplace in several ways: It means fewer interruptions to work, less time spent onboarding, and better, more established working relationships.
But there’s another aspect of employee retention that’s particularly important to the bottom line: Replacing employees is expensive. Improving year-over-year employee retention by even a few percentage points will save your organization a lot of money.
To measure how much your L&D program affects employee retention, measure the retention rate of employees who participate in learning programs versus those who don’t. If the results show employees who participate in your learning programs are far more likely to stay with your organization, you have a compelling story to tell your CEO.
3. Internal mobility rate
Everything about the benefits of employee retention counts double for internal mobility. Promoting employees internally keeps them happy, engaged, and growing professionally, all while drastically reducing your organization’s hiring costs and increasing organizational efficiency overall.
To tie your internal mobility rate directly to your learning program, it’s worth keeping tabs on the people who are moving around internally — whether they’re getting promoted or tackling new projects and tasks on different teams. Ideally, a disproportionate percentage of this population is composed of people who have participated in your learning programs. (If not, you may need to revisit your offerings.)
This data is going to have real meaning to your CEO. It also acts as a compelling argument for more employees to participate in your learning programs, as those who participate may increase their chances of getting promoted or taking on exciting new opportunities.
4. Learning completion rates
Though this metric may be less compelling to the CEO than others, it’s still worth monitoring and presenting to leadership — in combination with the other metrics on this list. People who actually complete your programs are implicitly endorsing their value (that is, if completion isn’t mandatory).
In any company that’s allocating resources to learning and development programs, it’s important to show leaders that those resources aren’t going to waste. A high utilization and completion percentage indicates employee engagement and a positive experience.
5. Progress toward closing skill gaps
Knowing your organization’s skills profile and future business needs can help you identify and close skills gaps that are critical to your business. Your team can use these insights to recommend learning content, create a strategic roadmap designed to further develop those skills, and forge career pathways for employees that reward them for skills mastery.
Measuring progress on closing skills gaps is a useful way to showcase the impact of your learning plan. Not only does it enable you to curate the right content for your learners, but it also gives you the information you need to grow and iterate on your future plans. You’ll also have a significant savings in both time and costs from targeting your approach.
6. Improved performance reviews
By tracking skill development and closing skill gaps in the manner described above, you can also tie L&D directly to the trajectory of overall employee performance.
Start by creating personalized skill learning paths for each employee and give them an opportunity to demonstrate how learning these new skills has improved their performance. Work with managers so they can properly assess and report the impact of these learning paths in their performance reviews.
7. Improved employee productivity
LinkedIn data shows that effective employee development can increase performance by up to 25 percent. You can equate improved employee productivity to ROI easily in any number of ways: number of tasks completed per week, number of assignments completed on or ahead of time, amount of time required to complete projects, etc. You could even dig deeper by looking at task completion times — both before and after an employee acquires a specific skill.
Improved productivity indicates higher efficacy, as well. The more adept people become at a given task, the more successful they’ll feel. This improves the likelihood of them taking on more complex roles and tasks in the future.
8. Number of skills learned per learner
This L&D metric is both impactful and easy to track in LinkedIn Learning. Your LinkedIn Learning dashboard will give you an overview of each employee participating in your L&D program, their progress toward personalized skill learning goals, and how many goals each has achieved.
Armed with this information, the story you present to your CEO immediately becomes more compelling. Instead of merely demonstrating how many employees are using your L&D programs, you can showcase specifically which skills are being learned and how they can improve performance. You can even make a case for how each skill relates back to improving the bottom line.
The takeaway for L&D leadership
The best way to get the attention of your company’s leaders is to provide metrics that show how your learning program helps the business stay agile, adaptable, and profitable in an ever-changing world. A big part of that is understanding how the entire picture impacts revenue. This includes company culture, employee experience, and professional development — which aren’t always understood as measurable outcomes of training.
By paying close attention to the right L&D metrics, you can communicate the value of training as a competitive edge within your organization.
Topics: Impact of learning Talent leadership
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