Recognising the Importance of Effective KPIs

Whether you’re in the early stages of basic employee training or have a fully developed program, understanding key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial to monitoring the success of your organisation’s learning interventions, allowing you to ensure you are delivering effective training and getting a significant return on your investment.

We can break down some of the most useful KPIs to use. However, in the long run, your chosen KPIs may need changing or developing. It’s important you regularly check in with organisational goals, team goals and individual job role goals and set your KPIs accordingly.

Key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs to evaluate success at reaching targets. – KlipFolio

What are the most common KPIs?

Let’s say you have just rolled out a new compliance course to your entire organisation or offered a new communication e-learning course to a specific department. How can you monitor the success of the course?

These standardised KPIs can be ideal for this type of monitoring.

Utilisation Rates. All efficient learning management systems offer metrics to see how many people have opened the course. Classroom session attendance can also be monitored manually. No matter how your course is delivered, or whether it is optional or mandatory, there are ways to monitor it for uptake.

This means you can follow up with people who didn’t complete mandatory classes, and monitor the popularity and desirability of optional ones, helping you to ensure you’re investing in the right upskilling opportunities for your staff.

Completion Rates. Similarly, it is important to monitor completion rates, especially for mandatory courses. Opening the course is one thing, but if you are investing in training for your employees, you want to be sure it is completed.

Pass Rates. These days, a lot of training courses involve some form of gamification in the form of an activity, quiz or they may have an assessment at the end. These statistics can serve as a useful KPI. Assessing whether employees have understood the information is an indicator of training course success.

Satisfaction Rates. You can use feedback and surveys as an indicator of success too. Ask employees who have completed any given course how they found it, how they will put the new knowledge into practice and so forth. This can inform changes to your program. For example, employees may have a compulsory e-learning cause that they feel would be more productive as classroom sessions in future. Keeping an open channel of communication with learners will always be important!

Whilst these rates can all offer insight into overall satisfaction and popularity, when it comes to a long-term training program, more elaborate KPIs must be monitored to assess how the training is impacting business success overall. A course may have 100% completion, but that doesn’t mean the training that employees were delivered has necessarily had a positive and worthwhile impact on the business goals in the long term.

In this case, the following KPIs may serve as a useful starting point…

Job role competency rates. You can run competency rate reports to track the training progress of individuals, teams, and departments. This can be monitored through performance reviews, for example.

Moreover, evaluating manager effectiveness rates through employee feedback falls into job competency evaluation. Likewise, team development rates. You can also monitor close rates, financials, and other statistics to track how teams and individuals are developing in relation to the training you are providing them. Are you seeing genuine improvements in productivity?

Customer satisfaction. Customer feedback can be a valuable indicator of training success. Engaging with customers in detail to discuss the benefits of the service or product that your business offers can provide insight into whether the training you have offered has been beneficial. Great customer service is a valuable business asset and helps to retain customers.

Onboarding to productivity. Another way to track training effectiveness is to monitor how fast and smooth the training process for new hires is. How quickly are they functioning as valuable and fully productive team members? Could you streamline your training processes to improve this time?

Ultimately, training should be an investment, not an expense. When training programs are successfully monitored and adapted, they offer a productive return on investment. KPIs are crucial to this evaluation.

Every organisation has a different approach to training, a unique program curated to suit your employees and your business needs. Thus, every organisation will have unique KPIs. Those listed in this post are relatively generic and must be approached with the intent to adapt them to your own organisational needs.

The benefits of a successful training program are endless. Developing your employees’ skillsets leads to increased productivity and efficiency, which in turn increases the organisation’s competitive advantage and increases profits. Employees can be trained in new skills that help your business evolve; or they can be trained in existing ones, promoting their ability to complete tasks to a higher standard or more efficiently. When you can successfully track success or courses and programs, you can adapt accordingly.

Trainer Bubble offers an extensive range of training resources across a range of topics, including communication training, business development, leadership training and compliance. Explore how we can help you fill your skills gaps here.

Or, for more information, and to discuss the learning needs of your business, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.​