Measuring Effectiveness
What does effectiveness or its measurement mean? When talking about learning or other types of...
Online training has rapidly become more common over the past five years. It's an agile and cost-effective – and impactful – way of training staff, onboarding new employees, rolling out strategy, or supporting competence development during times of change. Yet, it is still surprisingly rare to stop and ask:
How do we know the training was effective and what did it actually produce?
This question is far from trivial. Increasingly, training is part of larger development initiatives or tied to longer-term business goals. Online training consumes time, money, and people's cognitive capacity. Still, few organizations have agreed on a clear method to evaluate the actual effects of online trainings and how to develop the trainings for better results.
What does ROI mean in the context of online training?
ROI, Return on Investment, refers to how much benefit an organization gains relative to the resources invested in training. It's not just about money: it's also about time, focus, and possibility to learn. Measuring the ROI of online training is not just cost accounting, but a way to make the value of training visible in relation to goals.
If you've already started to think about the benefits of online training – good! But often, even in these situations, the benefits of online training are considered too narrowly. If you only look at completion rates or user feedbacks, the interpretation of results can easily remain superficial. Completion rate does tell you something but what exactly – that remains unclear. Better indicators and questions that generate them are for example
- Did anything change?
- If so, what does it mean for the business?
Why should you calculate the ROI of online training?
When the online training ROI is systematically tracked and verified, the benefit goes far beyond than just executive reporting. It's about a larger benefit:
- Leadership gains visibility into how online training supports strategic changes or operational goals
- HR and other learning professionals can target efforts there where they have the most impact
- Training providers receive feedback that is based on more than opinions and which helps them to better tailor the content
- And most importantly: the participants feel that the training is relevant to their work and brings real value. This experience is created by involving them and asking about the impact, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
When the investment (whether time, money, or cognitive efforts) can be verified, online training becomes a part of a broader change. And measuring, including ROI, becomes a tool for guidance and leadership.
How to choose the right metrics?
A common pitfall in calculating ROI is measuring only those things that are easy to measure, while overlooking those data points that would reveal more broadly the impact of training.
When choosing metrics or trackable things for ROI calculation, start with goals. At a high level, this could mean why the online training program is being adopted in the first place, and at a more detailed level, it's about the goals of individual trainings or training programs that are tied to business goals.
Goals related to online trainings could include something like these:
- Shorter onboarding time
- Improved customer service quality
- Fewer errors in processes
- Competence development in a specific area
- Increased occurrence of desired behaviors
Tracking and verifying the effectiveness of training can be done quantitatively, for example by tracking the duration and number of trainings, number of completed activities, number of errors, self-assessments, observations about the organization or the team. It can also be qualitative, for example feedback discussions. Measuring is, however, always quantitative, and when it comes to calculating ROI, numbers matter.
Triangulating metrics (using metrics from different perspectives) often brings out the best and most reliable results when talking about anything that has an effect on something. Online training is no exception. Additionally, online training platform offers excellent tools for collecting measurement data and verifying the impact of the trainings.
How to calculate the costs and benefits of online training?
The costs of online trainings should be considered holistically:
- Training design and content production
- Platform usage costs and possible maintenance costs
- Time from experts, HR, and leadership
- Time participants spend on training
Benefits can be direct or indirect, such as:
- Shortened onboarding time
- Fewer errors or complaints
- Faster learning or readiness for change
- Improved customer experience
- Clearer practices or procedures
These are not always easy to put into perspective, as it is in many other measuring-related things. The key is to start the measuring – or ROI calculation – boldly with an estimate. The estimates will refine over time. Even a rough calculation often reveals places where online training adds value and where there's room for improvement.
Analytics to support ROI calculation
The analytics provided by the online learning platform provides useful tools for tracking the effectiveness of different trainings. Directly derived from the analytics of the online learning platform include for example:
- Course completion rates and participation numbers
- Training duration
- Question responses and success rates
- Time limits, pauses, proceeding in courses
Combine this data with the organization's own metrics, such as employee satisfaction, customer feedback, or quality indicators. This places the training impact in the right context and you get information that you can use also in decision-making.
Case example: Measuring the ROI of onboarding
One client began using Vuolearning for onboarding new employees. Their goal was to shorten the time it takes for a new hire to become productive. Previously, this took an average of six weeks. After the onboarding path was updated, the average dropped to 4.9 weeks.
The result: concrete benefit in the form of hundreds of hours of additional capacity per year. They also gained insights into which content was critical for achieving the goal and where there was room for improvement.
Best practices for measuring the online training ROI
- Start with the goal, not the metric
- Choose metrics that answer meaningful questions
- Combine data from multiple sources
- Utilize analytics but remember context in all measurement
- Use the results as basis for discussion: what is the current state, how could we improve, what matters most to us, to what do we want to commit together
- Communicate results, this builds trust and engages people to online learning.
Measuring the ROI of online training.
Conclusion
Online training platform is not just for distributing content, and online training is not just class room training in digital form. At best, online training is a powerful tool for supporting impact and change. As with all initiatives and activities aiming for change, the change and the effectiveness of the activities is worth measuring.
When the measuring is directly tied to the organization's business goals and everyday life, the training becomes a part of the organizations' adaptability. Then the training is not an expense, but an investment whose benefits can also be verified.