Whenever it has been aligned with business objectives, training has helped companies navigate their global market environments and gain a competitive advantage. As the company is investing in its personnel and has a financial stake in the individual advancement of its team members, training objectives should be consistent with organizational priorities.

A private corporation will be accountable to its shareholders and it will be the responsibility of a non-profit or government entity to optimize the value of finances made available for its purpose. For any entity, these are fair expectations to anticipate from an investment in training. In a conventional input, output diagram, we can begin to calculate contribution gains against at least one of the main categories. If we test these against SMART targets and against a program or activity, sufficient data may be obtained by a company to at least justify the expenditure.

In order to tie business objectives to training objectives, you need to ask and answer the following questions:

• What is the business problem at hand?
• How are you conducting business activities and what are the outcomes?
• How does the proposed training program fit with your overall business strategy?
• Who are the people being trained and what are their expectations from the training?
• How will you assess the success of the training program 6 to 12 months from now?

Once you answer these questions, you will be armed with the information needed to adjust a training program to meet the expectations of the participants from it and ensure it meets your success criteria for it 6 to 12 months down the road. This is important because it shows the long-term business benefit and ROI of the training program.

KPIs You Should Follow and Present to Your Leadership

The following are the training ROI KPIs to follow and present to the company leadership.

Profitability Linked to Training

Profit per employee is one statistic that the leaders certainly care about. In an ideal world, each employee should provide value to the organization that is greater than their expense (income, benefits, etc.)

Therefore, the impact of training on the bottom line is a metric that you must certainly track. With this information, you can secure buy-in from top leadership for future training programs/sessions. The Talent Development Association found that businesses that invested in rigorous training saw 218 percent higher revenue per employee than businesses that did not offer formal training.

Number of Employees Wanting Formal Training

It is proven by research time and again that employees demand and want training that allows them to better do their jobs. A study by the University of Middlesex in London that surveyed 4300 workers found that 74% of the respondents felt that because they were not properly trained, they weren’t reaching their full potential at work.

Additionally, a 2018 Workforce Learning Report study by LinkedIn finds that more than 90% of employees would stay longer at a company if it invested in their development.

Employee Turnover

We know that the majority of employees want training and will stick around at a company for longer if it is invested in their development. Therefore, it is important to track the employee turnover rate. A high turnover could be an indication that your company is not conducting enough trainings or that your training programs are not very effective in developing employees to a level where they feel valued and needed.

Engagement Rate

Another important KPI to track is the engagement rate of a training program or learning experience platform. Measuring engagement rate is critical because the level of engagement of a learner is a key indicator of how effective a training program or platform is likely to be and what return on investment (ROI) can be expected from it.

The engagement rate for a training program or LXP can be measured by tracking its solved missions, appreciations, comments, etc., the number of active accounts, the daily average of users, the time spent on the platform, the ease in use, and the utility in everyday life.

Employee Emotional Intelligence

High EQ can be linked to around 58 per cent of the success in all types of jobs. By measuring the emotional intelligence of employees, you can find out how many of your employees need to improve their EQ. By illustrating the relationship between high EQ and high job performance, you can get the buy-in from the leadership for training programs that create high-performing employees by improving employee EQ.

Reaction Speed of an Organization to a Tight Market Competition

One of the biggest indications of an effective training program or a learning experience platform (LXP) is that it helps to speed up an organization’s reaction to tight market competition. Additionally, it makes it easier to meet the exigencies of the consumers by increasing consumer interaction. Therefore, you would want to measure your training program or LXP for these two things to prove their effectiveness and get buy-in from the leadership for their future use.

Alignment with Business Goals

The experiential themes proposed by a training program or learning experience platform (LXP) should reflect in the business strategy or vice versa. Moreover, these experiential themes should consolidate the knowledge gained over time and accelerate the development of skills through practice tests to ultimately benefit’s the business’s bottom line.

Impact on Company Performance and Bottom Line

Although learner participation, growth, and satisfaction are all important considerations, the most significant KPI for many companies is whether a training program or LXP leads to improved company performance and bottom line.

In a sales organization, this may mean looking for improvements in order numbers or customer data that are linked to a training program or the use of a learning experience platform (LXP). In the services industry, it might mean increased efficiency or improvements in customer satisfaction.

Although measuring all of these KPIs is useful for proving training ROI, it is recommended that you establish a set of expectations regarding what can be achieved with a training program or LXP. And then based on those expectations, you should create KPIs.

Top leadership teams want to see value for money in any training or development initiatives before they sign them off. One of the main reasons for this is that the money spent by most businesses on employee training is not getting the desired result.

The only way to change the mindset of the top leadership about training programs is by proving their ROI. This can be done by appropriately measuring ROI for training programs.