In the corporate world, your success as an organization depends on your employees to a great extent. What kind of talent are you hiring? Do they possess the requisite traits that are needed to make it in this field? Have they been trained enough? No matter what you say, unless your employees are putting their best foot forward, your company isn’t going to grow the way you want it to. That is precisely why most companies have training programs from time to time. Irrespective of the kind of industry you’re in, newer and better developments are taking place every day. Better software, new market trends, some innovative new practices- don’t you think it’s important to stay up to date with these?

The training programs organized by companies can help with that. These aim to help the new employees get the hang of the business and also introduce the latest practices to the existing employees. Now, each company spends a significant amount of money on these training programs. Naturally, it is important to measure the effectiveness of these programs. Why, how else would the company determine the success of the training programs?! Here are a few ways how and why you should measure training effectiveness:

  • The participants in the program submit a sort of visual confirmation that they’ve picked up some things from the training. Each participant should be able to provide a video or any other form of visual proof, that shows exactly how the training program has helped him hone his skills.
  • Participants who are able to pass on the acquired knowledge demonstrate the effectiveness of a particular program. For instance, if a participant learns a brand new concept or technique at one such program, he should now be in a position to pass on this knowledge to others.
  • Each training program should be followed up by a skill assessment. As a matter of fact, this should be made mandatory. A thorough assessment of the skills picked up by each of the participants would tell you how effective the program was or wasn’t.

Well, now that you know how training effectiveness can be measured, have you come across the phrase, “learning management system”? A learning management system or LMS is a system that takes over the entire administration of your training program. You must have come across certain online courses and training sessions. Now, this is a lot like that, only it is more channelized in a specific direction. The system is used by different educational institutions or even corporate organizations to track, report, document and deliver an optimised kind of education to their members, or in this case, employees.

eLearning is all the rage right now. As it turns out, people are more likely to enrol in online courses and try out online training programs than the previously used traditional methods. Learning management system incorporates this elearning culture into its very foundation. This is how a training program under this system works:
The participants are expected to register in the system. That is followed by a detailed and thorough training session where all the relevant topics are dealt with. This comes under the administration side of things. Next comes the assessment and analysis of training effectiveness. It also provides a detailed analysis of the training content or the course as a whole.

Earlier, it would be quite challenging to monitor the content of the training programs. That was entirely at the mercy of the training manager. Also, how would you determine if all that was covered in the session has actually sunk in? Simply getting eye witness accounts or doing random surveys weren’t too fruitful. Because truth be told, no one takes these surveys seriously. On the other hand, you have LMS- a scientifically developed system which doesn’t leave anything to chance. From the beginning to the end, the entire training session is under complete surveillance. Everything that is covered in the program will be monitored, along with the participants’ interpretation and reaction towards it.

Naturally, it becomes a whole lot easier to analyse the effectiveness of the training programs. If you’re pouring money into training programs, you should ensure that it doesn’t go to waste; and the only way of doing that would be to implement a learning management system to measure your training effectiveness.