By now you have an Learning Management System installed for staff training and development. This is great, but there’s one important question that you need to be asking: Is your LMS App helping your business? If the data you’re getting back from your Learning Management System isn’t helping you drive business decisions, here’s what you can do to get on the right track:
Step 1: Determine what you need
First, determine what you need the LMS to do for your company. The old saying “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” applies directly to this step. Do you want to see a reduction in cooking line mistakes, which means less food returns and higher profit margins? Do you want your retail floor employees to have more comprehensive product knowledge, which results in quicker sales and higher month-to-month revenues? Create concrete goals that your learning system will address.
Step 2: Contextualize your analytics
Second, review and contextualize the analytics you’re gathering. It’s not just pulling data - raw numbers don’t mean anything. You need to analyze that data, looking at the information in context alongside your goals. Many times a learning program will be implemented and left at that: “We did it! We have a company-wide LMS in place.” We like Watershed’s definition of learning analytics:
The measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners, learning experiences, and learning programs, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and its impact on an organization’s performance.
With regard to the questions posed previously, are the cooking line courses measuring accuracy, or are they just showing technique? Are your employees able to demonstrate what they know about the products, or are their test scores reflecting a best guess based on deductive reasoning?
Step 3: Set goals
Third, consider your goals alongside the analytics. Is your Learning Management System helping? Does your LMS support multiple lesson formats? Are you able to pull the right information for your analytics? Be prepared to answer these questions and take action if you find that you need to make adjustments to the content, the reports, even up to replacing your LMS with a modern system that can address your goals.
Answering these questions and aligning your learning system with your business goals will help your organization be more agile when it comes to future planning. More targeted goals can be matched with new courses, which will advance the business and employee engagement.
