Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D's Burning Questions PDF

Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions It’s often said that learning lags behind other areas of the business when it comes to the way it reports. For too long, L&D has relied on using learner satisfaction scores and demonstrating productivity (e.g., content cr...

Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions It’s often said that learning lags behind other areas of the business when it comes to the way it reports. For too long, L&D has relied on using learner satisfaction scores and demonstrating productivity (e.g., content created and hours of training completed) as its main reporting method. This is no criticism, more a reflection of the limited data that learning leaders have ready access to, often straight from LMS dashboards. Eight years of collecting feedback from the L&D community1 has consistently told us that L&D’s desire to measure is not matched by capability. Yet learner actions and content usage both leave huge digital footprints, albeit often scattered across a vast ecosystem of different systems and platforms. Unifying and unlocking this data opens the door to some wonderful insights that equip learning leaders to answer a whole array of burning questions. This guide highlights some of the most popular questions learning leaders answer using learning analytics. These questions may be quickly fired off in the flow of work by other stakeholders or as part of a deeper dive into analyzing L&D’s performance. Informing your answers with data is a surefire way to grab C-Suite attention and add gravitas to addressing your organization’s core challenges. It also aligns the learning function with other data-led reporting that other business areas use.2 We invite you to consider: What insights could you unlock using your ecosystem’s data? 1. Watershed, Measuring the Business Impact of Learning in 2023 2. CLO, Adopting Learning Analytics: Closing the C-Suite/L&D Language Gap, 2022 watershedlrs.com © Watershed Systems, Inc  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Contents How can learning leaders and practitioners benefit from L&D data? 2 View the 10-minute video summary 2 Gain insights into the learner experience 3 Uncover organizational learning needs with hierarchy data 6 Save time and keep stakeholders in the loop with automated L&D reports 8 Optimize L&D investments with learning content analytics 9 The burning questions data can answer for learning leaders 11 The burning questions data can answer for the wider business 11 Further reading and useful resources 13 How to Use Learning Data to Answer Key Business Pain Points 14 Learning Analytics in Action 14 What's in a Modern Learning Ecosystem? 16 How to Build the Business Case for Investing in Analytics 17 1  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions How can learning leaders and practitioners benefit from L&D data? Learner leaders and practitioners can use L&D data to: Inform learning strategies. By analyzing L&D data, you can identify what’s working and what’s not and make necessary adjustments to your learning initiatives. Personalize the learning experience. By understanding employees’ learning preferences and needs, you can create personalized learning paths catering to their jobs and needed skills. Measure the impact of your learning initiatives. By tracking key metrics like course completion rates, assessment scores, and on-the-job performance, you can demonstrate your learning programs’ impact. Get a real-time view of organizational skills. Understand where your organization currently sits in terms of existing and needed skill sets at any given time. Recommended Reading: How to Build a Business Case for Learning Analytics WE EXPLAIN MORE IN THIS 10-MINUTE VIDEO CLIP. 2  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Gain insights into the learner experience “Can we improve the learner experience?” “Are we meeting demand - what are learners searching for?” Providing a positive learning experience is crucial for the success of your learning and development initiatives. But what exactly is “learner experience,” and why is it important? Learner experience refers to learners’ overall experience during their learning journey. This includes factors such as the quality of the learning content, the ease of access to learning resources, and the level of support provided during the learning process. A positive learner experience enhances learning outcomes and boosts learner engagement and motivation. After all, when learners enjoy their learning experience, they’re more likely to engage with the learning content and apply what they’ve learned on the job. And this leads to improved performance and productivity. Moreover, by collecting learner experience data, you gain valuable insights into how learners interact with training resources and content. You can identify any challenges they face, gaps in L&D content, and areas where you can improve the overall learner experience. You can combine a data-led approach to understanding how your content is utilized with traditional learner feedback (e.g., happy sheets) to paint a far more compelling case of learner satisfaction. Recommended Reading: Learning Analytics Dimensions: What’s Learning Experience Analysis? 3  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Dashboards that are simple to use are essential for analyzing learner data because the people who will use them are typically line managers—who may lack experience working with data. For example, this dashboard shows how learner data can inform managers about where to focus, how their team is performing, who is excelling, and who needs help. They can also spot trends or see who is licensed to do specific jobs. 4  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Real-world insights for informed decision-making At Applied Industrial Technologies, coaches enrich their coaching sessions with managers using L&D reports. These reports outline competency strengths and weaknesses, drawing insights from learning assessment data and business performance metrics. The comprehensive L&D reports enable coaches to make informed recommendations for addressing weaknesses and driving improvement. By implementing learner analytics, coaches gain valuable insights into the precise training needs of managers, allowing for more tailored and practical training and coaching programs that directly cater to their development needs. Another real-world example is a pharmaceutical company’s sales team, which used Watershed to analyze salespeople’s quiz game scores following an in-person training event. This analysis revealed that many salespeople had missed the main point of the training, prompting the team to provide additional targeted training to bridge the knowledge gap effectively. 5  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Uncover organizational learning needs with hierarchy data “Can I scale my insights using hierarchy data (by job role, by region, by department)?” Hierarchy data refers to the hierarchical structure of an organization—including the relationships between different departments, teams, and individuals. You can use hierarchy data to better understand your organization’s learning needs. For example, the sales team’s learning needs may differ vastly from the IT team’s. By understanding these differences, you can create tailored learning programs catering to each team’s needs. Hierarchy data also helps track the progress of your learning initiatives at different levels of the organization. You can see how each team performs throughout their training, identify any lagging teams, and implement necessary interventions. And finally, you can use hierarchy data to align learning initiatives with organizational goals. By understanding each team’s strategic objectives, you can design learning programs that support these objectives and drive business growth. Here’s an example of an organizational hierarchy visualized in Watershed. (Most real organizational hierarchies imported from an HRIS are considerably more complex.) 6  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions How is hierarchy data used in practice by learning leaders? At Watershed, we see hierarchy data being used in very practical and powerful ways. Global organizations often role out training initiatives in response to region-specific issues, using bespoke reporting to assess impact. When this data shows either proof of training success, or indeed highlights source causes of the original issues (i.e, automotive dealerships noting repeat battery replacements in EVs), it becomes easier for L&D to capture C-Suite attention. Making the case that a regional issue should be looked at at an organizational level is a lot more compelling when the problem has been “trialed” at a regional level. Recommended Reading: How to Combine HRIS Data and L&D Data for Comprehensive Reporting 7  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Save time and keep stakeholders in the loop with automated L&D reports “Can I optimize our system to do the fancy stuff (ecosystem-wide credentialing, automated workflows and prompts)?” “Do we empower line managers and L&D with localized insights and automated reports?” In the world of learning and development, data should be king. But with so much information to sift through, how do you make sense of it all? This is where automated reports come into play. Automated reports help you analyze your L&D data and derive meaningful insights. Automated reports provide a wealth of information—from detailed performance reports to anomaly or trend analysis reports. They show how learners progress in their training programs, which learning modules are the most effective, and how learning initiatives contribute to business results. Automated reports also mean you can track L&D KPIs in real-time. Monitor your training programs’ performance and make necessary adjustments on the fly. They also save you a significant amount of time and effort by eliminating the need for manual data analysis and report generation. Automating your reports solves two more common learning leader pain points. The first is ensuring the correct permissions are set to ensure the reports only show the personal data relevant for the recipients - especially important when global L&D teams have to navigate different regional data protection laws. Regional managers may have access to relevant aggregated views, whereas line managers will need individual track records. The second pain point is removing the restriction of L&D relying on other departments (IT) to produce reports on an ad-hoc basis. Powering your learning function with the data to analyze nurtures a curious mindset, one of the core essentials when it comes to building L&D’s analytic capabilities. Recommended Reading: How Automated Reports and Reminders Enhance Your L&D Workflow 8  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Optimize L&D investments with learning content analytics “Is licensed content being utilized?" "Are the content and systems we’re paying for actually being used? Is Instructor-Led Training outperforming my online offerings?” Effective learning leaders constantly examine utilization and where they can save money or make money, save time or make time, and make the lives of everyone around them better to truly develop people. So, the most logical question to start with here is: Are my platforms, courses, and user licenses being utilized? From there: If I have these licenses associated with courses or libraries, how can I go back and renegotiate those license terms? The whole point of content analytics is to improve the content, plain and simple. Here’s how: Spotting what needs fixing: Training content analytics gives you the lowdown on what’s working and what’s not—so you can make the necessary content improvements. Ditching the dead weight: It also helps you figure out which content is taking up space so you can remove unnecessary, dated, or other irrelevant resources. Creating top-notch content: By seeing and understanding what great L&D content looks like, instructional designers and content curators up their game and produce better training material. Filling in the blanks: Content analytics show where your content might be lacking, ensuring you cover all the bases for your learners. 9  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions This example Watershed report shows how you can use learning content analytics to observe user search behavior and accessed content. You can also monitor specific courses, such as the Leadership Training course (shown on the right). For example, Alfonso Riley, L&D Strategist at Caterpillar, used content analytics to pinpoint the most popular training videos on CAT’s Kaltura video platform. After analyzing data from multiple months, he found that around five or six videos garnered significantly more views than the others in the platform’s extensive video library. Taking a closer look at these videos, he delved into why they were popular. As a result, he applied these insights to shape his approach to launching and promoting new video content. In other words, having all your data in a standard normalized format makes the lift easier. 10  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions The burning questions data can answer for learning leaders In summary, learning in a global organization leaves traces across various platforms and systems. Once you can aggregate, cleanse, and align this data (with the option of throwing HRIS and business performance data, aka KPIs), you can look to answer your burning L&D questions in meaningful ways that engage the wider business. If you look at the summary of the questions we’ve covered here, you start to sense the breadth of powerful insights you can achieve through applying learning analytics to your training programs: Can we improve the learner experience? What are learners searching for? Are we meeting that demand? Are we focusing our coaching in the right areas? Does our learning content actually cover the core topics? Can I scale my insights using hierarchy data (e.g., by job role, region, department, etc.)? Can I optimize our system to do the fancy stuff? (e.g., ecosystem-wide credentialing, automated workflows, and prompts) Do we empower line managers and L&D with localized insights and automated reports? Is licensed content being utilized? Are learners using the content and systems we’re paying for? Is instructor-led training outperforming my online offerings? Is training impacting business KPIs? Can we prove the impact of specific initiatives? How do I overcome siloed reporting from our global ecosystem? 11  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions The burning questions data can answer for the wider business We’re leaving these here as food for thought on the broader business pain points you can address using analytics. For further context, we’d recommend catching the webinar recording. Compliance & Legal Are we licensed to operate? Can we prove & time spent on training (% of payroll or time-unit)? Can we scale up reports to factor in different regional regulations? Can we trust the data we’re reporting on? Can we access live-time reports in the moment of need? Does L&D reporting follow data governance best practices? HR How do we attract, retain, and upskill our staff? Can we become a skills-based organization? Where are our skills gaps, and does L&D close them? Can we measure talent mobility? Even better, can we link talent mobility to our own training programs? Does our own training cover DEI best practices? Do we have data to prove it? Do we align with L&D to offer a cohesive “people strategy”? 12  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Sales Does sales training impact core KPIs, such as revenue or pipeline progress? Do we drive sales team behavior changes? Can we spot outliers, over-achievers, and under-achievers? How do we measure and assess extended enterprise training? Can we empower sales leaders with insights to act independently? Can we automate reports for sales leaders? Does our learning data integrate with existing reporting (e.g., Power BI tools?) At Watershed, we specialize in collecting, cleansing, and aggregating data from your learning ecosystem. Our reporting platform then uses these live-time data feeds to provide you with on- demand insights that drive your workforce strategy. If you’d like to explore how learning analytics can benefit your organization, our team would be happy to hear from you: REQUEST A DEMO 13  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Further reading and useful resources Learning Analytics Case Study: Nebraska Medicine Healthcare 9,000+ employees See how Nebraska Medicine uses Watershed to digitize manual practices to ensure hand hygiene compliance. Their shift from pen and paper observations allowed management to have instant access to live-time reports, allowing quicker interventions while also streamlining the process. Their new data- led approach also enabled them to show how scalable their solution was, demonstrating clear adoption rates, process efficiencies and cost- and time-saving benefits: 15% Increase in hand hygiene observations $4,050 Estimated monthly time savings 60 Hours saved each month from manually entering data READ THE FULL STORY Explore more learning analytics case studies: Danone: See how Danone connected an ecosystem that caters to 100,000+ employees across 57 countries. Caterpillar: See how Caterpillar turned to analytics to create an award-winning extended enterprise learning model that focused on improving workforce leadership, sales, and service- related competencies. 14  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions How to Use Learning Data to Answer Key Business Pain Points - Webinar Recording Catch the full webinar recording as we explore how you can use learning data to address business pain points we commonly hear from the C-Suite—including learning leaders, compliance and legal, sales, and human resources. WATCH THE WEBINAR 15  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions What's in a Modern Learning Ecosystem? Learning leaves a huge digital footprint, often scattered across a vast ecosystem of unique systems and platforms. This image reflects the many different platforms used to manage and deliver learning, from the familiar (LMS, LXP, content libraries, and survey tools) to more specialist tools (such as Xapimed’s observation tool). Unlocking this information opens the door to wonderful insights that equip learning leaders to answer a wide array of burning questions. LEARN MORE 16  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions Struggling to convince the business to invest in analytics? You’re not the first. Our interactive tool will help you: Assess where your strategic priorities lie Highlight benefits of your priority use case Provide tips on winning over stakeholders 17  Learning Leader Challenges: Using Analytics to Answer L&D’s Burning Questions About Watershed Watershed’s Learning Analytics Platform turns your learning data into insights that inform your learning strategy. Our reporting lets you assess the effectiveness of your learning programs, learner performance, and vendor effectiveness. Learning leaders can now measure and prove the business impact of learning, making data-informed decisions that engage the C-suite. Watershed collects, aggregates, and standardizes data across your learning ecosystem and presents it in easy-to-use reports and dashboards. Using HRIS data, you can view trends by any level of organizational hierarchy—like region, job role, or down to every action a learner takes, no matter the system or platform they’re using. Watershed is part of Learning Technologies Group plc’s award-winning group of specialist learning technology and talent management businesses. To learn more, visit watershedLRS.com. 18