When we say vendor, we mean any person or group outside of your organization that has been tasked to deliver a product or service to you. For example, a payroll software provider or a manufacturer would be a vendor.

Choosing the right vendor is not just about getting the right products, tools, or services. If you will be working closely with them, it’s important to choose very carefully.

Do you already have any vendors that are always awkward or painful to work with? Are there any you dread working with? It’s okay if you do. Many of us do. On the flip side of that, do you also have vendors that are a joy to work with?

Think about it. Examine the reasons why these interactions are so different. It’s not just about the service they provide (although that can be a big factor.) It’s also about how easy they are to work with.

That’s what Matthew Brown discusses in this episode of The Learning Xchange podcast. Matthew (Schoox’s VP of Learning and Brand Success) shares his advice for choosing a vendor that can become a true partner of your organization.

Listen to the podcast below or keep reading.

How do you choose a vendor that meets your needs?

When choosing vendors or partners to work with, the first step is to establish what you need. For example, it could be product design, an accounting system, a learning solution, or consulting services.

When shopping around for vendors, look at the features, offerings, functionality, and capabilities on offer. The first step is to make sure that, technically speaking, the vendor is a match and ticks all the boxes.

To do this, you can send out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to vendors. An RFP lets you collect offers from various vendors to ensure they meet all your criteria.

However, some businesses rely on using a generic RFP template. It’s not bad to use a template, but you really need to tailor it to your needs. Not tailoring your RFP means you could end up with a product or service that doesn’t quite tick all the boxes.

No two businesses are the same. We all have different needs, experiences, and perspectives. Using a template to drive your entire project is going to result in missing the mark.

If you still want to use a template, that’s fine, but look at it as more of an idea-starter. Use it as a foundation to build your processes and documentation.

When writing your RFP, think about the goals and strategies of your organization. Look at where you were last year versus now and build your requirements around that.

How does the vendor fit with your organization?

Checking the features and services a vendor provides is the easy part. You could end up with a service that does everything right and yet still run into issues.

That’s why it’s important to dig deeper and look at the vendor closely. This is something that people don’t do often enough!

When weighing up different vendors, ask yourself: is this vendor aligned with my own company culture, values, and goals?

Look at it as a hiring decision. When businesses hire people, they check that they are a good fit who aligns with the business’ core values.

We avoid bringing in people who don’t have the skills or aren’t a good fit because it doesn’t set anyone up for success. Interestingly, we don’t do the same when choosing vendors.

Vendors, while separate from your business, are still a key part of your organization.

When weighing up vendors, ask yourself one question: is this merely a vendor, or could they become more of a partner? Is this a company you simply purchase from, or one that works so well with you that they’re almost a business partner?

That’s what you want from a vendor, someone who acts as a partner.

The difference between ordinary vendors and partners

The difference between vendors and partners is that partners align with your organization.

They aren’t just a good fit. They’re a fit for your company culture and values. They understand who you are and what you do. Essentially, they become an extension of your team in a way that feels seamless. 

The best way to check this is to analyze the sales or sign-up process. You can tell a lot from the communication style of a vendor during this process.

If you notice any friction or something that doesn’t feel right, don’t ignore it. By ignoring it, you run the risk of bringing in the wrong people and products for your business. This can lead to a great deal of disruption and friction that you really don’t need.

What do the employees of the company say?

Checking that the vendor’s values are aligned with yours is more than most people do. But if you want to go even further, another exercise you can do is check what the employees say about the company.

How the employees feel will tell you a lot about what they’ll be like to work with. Spend some time looking through the likes of Glassdoor to get a sense of how the employees feel.

Are they happy? Do they have common complaints about working environments or management?

These employees could be the very people you end up communicating with. If many of them are disengaged, unhappy, and unmotivated, this will reflect in the service and communication. If the workplace is a toxic culture, think about how this could affect your working relationship.

It pays to pay attention to the details. If you are choosing an important product or piece of software that will affect your business’ day-to-day life, it’s not a decision to take lightly!

The post How to Find the Right Vendor for Your Organization appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

But how can you start to measure the impact that training has had on your organization?

You’ll find out in this episode of The Learning Xchange podcast, where Matthew Brown (Schoox’s VP of Learning and Brand Success) talks about how you can get started when it comes to measuring the resulting impact of training on your organization.

Hit play to listen to this episode of The Learning Xchange.

What is the role of learning in your organization?

Measuring and evaluating the impact your training is having on your organization is so important. However, sometimes it can be difficult to find the time and energy to get started. The good news is that you’re not alone. Many people struggle to take the first step when it comes to measuring the quality of training within their organization. Often, we must figure out how to navigate the approach of determining the impact of training and learning.

Proving that your learning activities have had a positive impact on the business is critical. It also helps if the impact can be replicated in the future, further validating the training’s effectiveness in question.

Before you can understand your training’s impact on your organization, you first need to consider the role (or roles) that training plays within the business.

Ask yourself, what is the role of learning within the organization? Here are a few possible roles that may be fulfilled by your training:

• Develop people capabilities
• Uncover needs
• Deliver interventions designed to help team members overcome gaps
• Change behaviors

These are just a few of the possible roles that learning may undertake within your business. There are many more to consider. Most of these roles are all in service of developing people capabilities. However, from a culture perspective, the role of training is also focused on motivating and engaging employees. It can even be leveraged to reinforce a values-based culture within an organization.

You might want to think about how your training can further develop a culture in the business. You may even want to focus your training more strategically and leverage it to maintain the employment brand. When you develop a culture of learning within an organization, it helps create powerful stories that employees can share. Before you know it, you’ve got a team of happy employees who want to tell the world how happy they are working at your organization.

The result? You create a demand, which helps elevate the company and attracts incredible talent to the organization.

How do your employees feel about training?

Do you know how your employees feel about training? Do they love it or hate it? Or, are they somewhat indifferent? Knowing how people feel about the training in your organization is key to driving maximum impact.

If employees don’t enjoy the training, you have to fix it so that you can implement training that employees genuinely love. If your employees already love the training, you’re ready to move on to the next step. Don’t think too much into it if your employees aren’t huge fans of your existing training. They might not have enough experience with training to build an opinion on it. Or, perhaps they have the mindset that training is just another thing to stroke off their to-do list.

Whatever the case may be, you’ve got to try and win over their hearts and minds by creating a training experience that employees feel benefits them and the organization. Understanding how your team feels about training is so important because it can help you take the right action to start implementing training that generates a greater impact.

Begin with the end in mind

Having some sort of plan in mind or vision for the future is hugely beneficial when trying to figure out the impact your training has on your organization. You don’t have to know everything at this point. However, it helps to know what direction you’re headed so that you can make strategic decisions around training and learning to help you stay on course.

When you envision the future, look beyond the first set of measurements you need to capture. You must gather relevant data that proves the training’s impact on the organization. But, then what? Let your mind wander and explore potential possibilities for the future of your training, and its overall impact on the organization.

An easy place to start is the business metrics that the organization really focuses on. You’ll see these metrics pop up in the company’s operating objectives and throughout the organization. To help identify these metrics, just listen! What is everybody talking about? What are the leaders talking about? What is everyone focusing on?

Is the business focusing on customers, creating new products, evolving services, or something related to generating more leads? Take stock, take inventory of all the things your business cares about. From there, take a closer look at each one and figure out which things are underperforming. The thing that is underperforming the most is your low hanging fruit and a great place to start.

Gather data

When gathering data to prove what impact training has had on the organization, ask yourself this important question:

Do you know who you’re trying to impact?

Are you trying to impact employees? Once you’ve identified who you’re trying to impact, think about what you want to impact. Are you trying to close a skill gap? Are you trying to change behaviors or attitudes? Or, perhaps you’re trying to fix a retention issue?

You must know who you’re trying to impact, what you’re trying to impact, and then, you need to figure out how you’re going to make that impact happen. You must know how to get the needle moving towards your end goal.

The final question to consider is how much are you trying to move that needle?

Your answers to these questions will help you understand how to effectively deliver learning to your audience (employees, team members, etc.) and for what purpose. While working on building your program, try to anchor everything back to your answers, which you can view as your guiding principles.

Once you have all of this down, you can start to measure the impact of your training effectively.

We hope that this post helps you to get started and take the first steps towards organizing yourself and your organization so that you can effectively begin to measure the impact of your training. Remember that every journey starts with a single step. You don’t have to take a huge leap to get ahead. This isn’t a marathon. Just take it one step at a time.

The post What to Do Before You Measure the Impact of Learning appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

As mentioned in part three of this series, if the bare minimum ‘table stakes’ metrics are all you’re tracking, you will never be able to truly measure the overall business impact of your learning and development programs.

If you’re only looking at how many people completed a training, do you really have any ideas why the success (or lack of success) in compliance is causing performance issues? Is it a specific skill or competency that lacks proficiency that could be the cause of performance issues? Are there other factors?

Essential Metrics L&D Teams Should Track to Show Business Impact

This leads us to the topic of more advanced metrics, some of which can be captured in your LMS while other metrics may require joining forces with other parts of the business, like IT, finance, or HR, to tell the full story. Let’s take a look.

Content-Focused Metrics

If you dig deeper into the content, you can start to understand metrics that can help shape your learning design so you can adapt and adjust the course content.

For instance, how many attempts does it take someone to pass a course exam? If more than one, perhaps the content is to blame. Maybe you’re testing them on things that weren’t covered. Maybe the content is unclear.

What about the performance on each question? If you knew that 100% of the people missed “Question 2” multiple times before they passed, explore what’s tied to that question. Is it worded poorly? Is it unsupported in the content?

Or consider the skill level. Was the course designed to improve a specific skill? If so, what’s the desired change? 

You can also explore drop-out rates. How many learners never finish a course? Do they drop at the same place? Is there a correlation between an employee’s geography, job title, or experience level and the drop-off activity? This is important for building training that gets the right information to the right people at the right time in the right format.

Performance-Focused Metrics

Schoox has a feature called ‘Knowledge Fuel,’ which reflects the level of adequate knowledge within an organization. It combines various performance metrics and reflects knowledge levels of your entire training spectrum down to a specific course.

This feature enables you to understand the impact on the organization when a person leaves. You can see the knowledge deficit the vacancy will create and predict any performance and potential business impacts it will have. Even if you hire an expert in the field, the incoming employee won’t have the exact background and skillset as the former employee, so there’s a definite impact you can’t ignore.

Business-Focused Metrics

Now for the elusive ROI. This is where you take the factors valued by your organization relative to learning and correlate them with your overall spend and other business metrics to describe what the ROI and business impact is for your training programs.

There are some basic ROI metrics. For example, spending $100k on a course to move it from in-person delivery to self-paced, resulting in saving $650k by eliminating travel and physical materials produced for in-person learning.

Then, there are more advanced ROI metrics. For example, delivering XYZ course and seeing a 15% proficiency improvement in one skill, resulting in a long-term ROI of $250k over the next two years relative to, say, coaching activities.

Segment-Focused Insights

Finally, you should consider segment-focused insights—how your training performs when in specific segments of your business. Are there industry or internal benchmarks you could align with? Is there a specific region that should expect different results?

Ready to Start Proving the Business Impact of Your Learning Programs?

Demonstrating the business impact of your training programs is critical to the future success of your organization. Get started by keeping these takeaways in mind:

• Make a plan to measure table stakes metrics (and aim for more).
• Collaborate and strategize to track more advanced metrics.
• Connect learning data to business impact. Know which KPIs are most important and how your learning can plug in to them.
• Take the ‘collection’ process seriously. Understand what you can and can’t get out of your LMS, and other departments.
• As your L&D activities progress, it’s not enough to just provide the data—you have to turn the insights into action to demonstrate the true business impact of learning.

Schoox provides a future-focused, end-to-end learning and talent development solution that makes it easy for L&D teams to draw a clear line between their learning programs and the direct business impact they have on helping organizations achieve their goals.

If you’d like to see how it works, schedule a demonstration with one of our representatives.

The post Measuring the Business Impact of L&D: Turn Insights into Action appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

In part one of this series, we began by honoring the reality of the pandemic’s impact on L&D and the need for organizations to “reset.” Part two introduced the importance of collaborating with departments outside of HR and L&D to align learning and talent functions with the overall business strategy.

That brings us to part three. Once you know how to align learning and talent with your organization’s key business strategies, you can start focusing on metrics. By ‘leveling up’ the learning data you’re currently tracking, you can then establish a link between your learning metrics and the KPIs associated with your organization’s business objectives.

What Do L&D Teams Typically Measure?

Many L&D teams are in the same boat. They rely solely on their LMS to deliver reporting and analytics, which means they may be under-reporting. There are six measures that are used most frequently:

1. Hours of training delivered
2. Completion rates
3. Compliance rates
4. Training scores
5. Satisfaction ratings (smile sheets)
6. Cost of training

But these measures don’t really help L&D and HR teams ‘level up.’ If you recall the Kirkpatrick Model, most of the six measures above align with levels one, two, or three, as shown below.

The ‘Table Stakes’ of Learning Metrics

Traditional learning data is fairly straightforward, but you must also consider the experience of the learner, the program, and the learner’s needs.

Let’s start with the ‘table stakes.’ Usually, this is the learning data that can be organized around many different contexts. But overall, it is to ensure you’re tracking three things:

1. Learner-based metrics or learner activities—Completions, time spent, exam scores, number of attempts
2. Learning experience—Satisfaction, technology, delivery formats
3. Learning program—Content applicability, drop-off rate, exam success rates

But there’s still so much more to explore. To go to the next level, you also need to consider the measurement of “benefit” and “business impact.”

Benefit-Based Metrics

Hard benefits are those that (a) can be attributed solely to the training program, and (b) can be assigned a specific financial value. Soft benefits are those that (a) cannot be solely attributed to the training program, and/or (b) cannot be readily assigned a specific financial value.

Hard Benefits—A specific benefit like achieving a targeted goal, i.e., a total reduction in costs of a new program compared to a prior version

Soft Benefits—Anecdotal, where training contributes alongside other programs or tactics like increased productivity, reduced absences, or greater customer satisfaction

Business Impact Metrics

Business impact metrics connect back to business strategy and KPIs. They provide the opportunity to connect all the dots between the skill and competency focus of training programs, and the link between that and the key strategies and KPIs. This way, you can determine the net impact your training has on the business.

Potential training and learning data metrics you may want to correlate with your KPIs include:

• Revenue per employee
• Profitability
• Revenue growth
• Customer satisfaction
• Voluntary turnover/retention
• Employee engagement
• Business process improvement
• Individual performance
• Team effectiveness
• Ability to respond to the market

Using Data to Guide Future Success

As you can see, data and analytics are necessary to help you make the shift from reactive to proactive and strategic when you think about your training programs.

Instead of fighting fires all the time, you can be more future-focused when you look at competencies, skills, and other elements of learning design so you can identify all the levers available to pull.

This also allows you to move to a more predictive analytics stage where the data will help you understand and predict where to place your emphasis.

For example, if you know turnover is a problem and you can identify some of the drivers behind it (e.g., poor leadership effectiveness or communication skills), you can roll out learning and development programs that are geared to support the individual underlying competencies.

This strengthens performance in a more sustainable way across the organization. It is also far more effective than building a course solely focused on addressing turnover.

Check out the final article of this series, where we focus on turning all of these insights into action and uncover the essential metrics every L&D team should be tracking.

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With so many disruptions, 2020 has been a catalyst for change. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the learning and development industry.

L&D has consistently approached challenges with resilience like no other department has. In this special Thanksgiving episode, Matthew Brown reflects on how L&D has evolved through its response to events of the last 12 months. Listen to the episode to hear Matthew discuss L&D’s management of unexpected events and how the industry continues to lead organizations to success.

Hit play to listen to this episode of the podcast below:

Or, find out more by reading on.

In this post, we’re summarizing the five things that we’re most thankful for this year and how each of them has played a part in L&D’s evolution.

1. Organizations appreciating L&D’s impact and ROI

One of the silver linings from this year’s events has been the elevated awareness and commitment to L&D. Organizations that once saw L&D as an optional investment now see it as a necessity.

Previously, when businesses were forced to make cutbacks, reducing training and L&D was considered an easy cost-cutting solution. Some organizations have historically struggled to appreciate the return on investment that comes from training activities, but this year there’s been a big shift. Organizations have actively prioritized their commitment to L&D.

Now, organizations see training departments as instrumental in helping them adapt. They’ve consistently helped organizations rebuild and emerge stronger than before, even after challenges that might have meant struggling to survive.

2. HR and L&D’s strengthened relationship

HR and L&D have been the backbone of many businesses, helping navigate difficult changes, but they’ve also been fundamental to ensuring employee happiness and success.

Both departments responded quickly and effectively to the disruptions to develop solutions and integrate them throughout organizations. But HR and L&D have also worked together, modeling what you can achieve if you focus on building working relationships. These cross-department opportunities enable collaboration and also lead to business and employee success in other areas, such as skills development, performance, goals, and learning.

By bringing together HR and L&D, organizations can enable a comprehensive approach to delivering learning strategies and maximizing their impact on the employee experience. To find out more about this, read our interview with HR and L&D expert Ellen Rockwell.

3. L&D’s continued commitment to driving innovation

Necessity is the mother of invention, but L&D is the mother of innovation. From overcoming virtual workplace challenges to rethinking your training approach, trainers and L&D professionals have been continuously tested on their ability to innovate their learning experiences.

How you were delivering training in Thanksgiving 2019 is undoubtedly very different from how you deliver training today. Many trainers moved online, using creative ways to provide the training that their learners needed and convincing organizations that their innovative solutions were more than up to the task.

Innovation is still happening in areas from delivery to course content. While some trainers tweaked aspects of their content, others went back to the drawing board to rewrite courses from scratch. But the most notable area is the demand for new technology.

Meeting different learner needs through a strictly online medium required a big rethink of what technologies were and weren’t working. Trainers quickly began trialing innovative ways to use existing technologies to reach their desired learning outcomes. Many L&D professionals are now working with software companies to help meet the new demands and provide solutions that help meet a wider variety of learner needs.

4. Opportunities to review how their existing learning works

This sudden shift also opened up an unexpected opportunity to stop and take stock of how we construct learning. It presented a unique chance to review and revisit training courses and ideas, as trainers had to think critically about how their training works when delivered remotely, but also how it works for learners in general.

While this can be a very daunting and challenging task, many trainers are using this opportunity to dig deep into their training and make changes so that it’s relevant for all learners and audiences. New technologies also mean that you can incorporate exciting and engaging content that perhaps you hadn’t considered (or wasn’t available) before. Whether you include gamification, interactive activities, or are taking your messages back to basics, having the space to review and rebuild is a fantastic opportunity. To learn more about ways to build training for different learners, check out this post.

5. L&D’s unwavering resilience

Learning and development have continually shown that it has an amazing commitment to persevere in uncertain times. The community has consistently leveraged communication and facilitation expertise to help our businesses figure out how to reshape, regroup, and move forward.

In many cases, businesses have deployed L&D resources to reshape these business operations, processes, and practices. Meanwhile, they’re also tackling learning, mental well-being, and stress management.

In fact, L&D’s traditional role is currently on hold for many professionals. But this instigates a new sense of purpose and focus. The training community is being called upon to develop learning activities and learning interventions, and find ways to integrate experiences that model empathy, mental wellness, and more.

The L&D community has come together to stress why leaders and managers should check in with their staff and prioritize support. Since the start of 2020, L&D has empowered teams and organizations to work together while we’re apart in order to stay successful and achieve more.

The impact of 2020 on the evolution of L&D has been remarkable. For this, we are truly thankful.

Thank you for reading The Learning Xchange’s Thanksgiving episode summary. Make sure you never miss an episode by subscribing to The Learning Xchange on your favorite podcast app (available on all the usual podcast apps, including Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and more) and get a new episode downloaded directly every week!

The post 5 Reasons to Be Thankful for 2020 and Its Impact on L&D appeared first on Schoox - A Learning Management System.

This is part two of a four-part series on how L&D teams can effectively evaluate, measure, and demonstrate the business impact of their learning and development programs. Read parts one, three, and four here.

To measure the impact of learning, you have to collaborate with other departments and align your learning and talent functions with the business strategy. This generally requires three steps:

1. Understand the business strategy and what the business needs from employees.
2. Plug into the talent development strategy to identify the skills and talent you need to deliver.
3. Evaluate where you have coverage, strength, and proficiency, as well as gaps and opportunities.

If you don’t have the right skills to meet the business needs, you may need to do some reskilling or upskilling and talent mobility before unleashing an effective training program. Of course, you don’t have to have it all figured out, but you should understand the full picture so you can create a path forward.

It’s difficult to prove the impact of training without clearly defined benchmarks so you can start there. For example, how do you know your training is effective? What does ‘effective’ mean to your business? Is it compliance? Is it moving the needle on a specific KPI? How do you know what levers to pull to consistently drive the desired performance and business results?

Learning Analytics and Business Outcomes

Demonstrating learning’s impact is a high priority, but what exactly do we mean when we say, ‘learning analytics’ or ‘learning impact’? In a nutshell, it means marrying your learning data with data from your business systems to better understand the bigger picture.

You can create the first layer of the foundation by taking inventory of what the business needs from employees and linking it back to competencies, skills, behaviors, and attitudes.

Then, if you take time to understand what employees need from the business, you can layer that in. When you take a combined look, you can start to identify areas where you have training content and areas you don’t, and you can now start to bridge that gap more effectively.

What Is Your Level of Learning Analytics Experience?

It helps to know where you are currently on your learning analytics journey to discover the path ahead.  Are you at level one, two, or three?

Many L&D teams find themselves at level one. They rely on reports and export simple data from the LMS that is often limited to measuring compliance or completion rates. 

If you’ve moved to the second tier, you’ve been able to partner with your IT Team. Perhaps they’ve built something like a ‘data lake’ or ‘data warehouse’ where they combine data from all business systems to create a scorecard. But in most cases, they’re still only looking at completion and compliance data from the LMS. 

If you’re not building learning with a competency focus, you’re still not able to fully explore its impact without drawing conclusions based on assumptions.

In other words, would you prefer to assume that turnover improved because training was at 100% compliance? Or would you prefer to know that a specific competency was impacted that translated to an increase in impact and performance?

You have to determine which level of analytics will help you:

• Keep the business going and adapt at the same time
• Keep people productive while reskilling and upskilling to improve performance in the new strategy
• Strengthen skills and close gaps only where needed
• Understand the skills available and how learning impacts reskilling and upskilling

Once you make that determination, you can learn how to connect your learning analytics to business impact, which is the focus of our next article in this series.

Part three of this four-part series will cover which KPIs are most important to your company, how to plug your learning into those, and then identify the touchpoints you can measure.

Want to identify the skills gap at your organization? Download our free Skills & Competency Framework to get started.

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