Let’s say your employees need to be recertified every two years, or when requirements change significantly. At the moment that means learners have to retake an updated version of the course every so often – on average every 15 months.

But the learners may already know large parts of the course. It turns into a tedious box-ticking exercise. Hours of work-time are lost. It is unproductive and demoralising.

So you decide to introduce automated “skills gap analysis” via the learning management system. A learner is tested for knowledge of the material. And then taken through the material she didn’t know that well. And the parts of the courses that are new.

Great! That will save time and not be as boring!

At this point some people would leap into the new project. Let’s go!

Not so fast.

Will It Work? How Will You Know?

We have way to see if the new approach actually works. It should. But does it, really? How do you know? How do you prove it to yourself? Can you prove it to sceptics? Can you convince learners?

So: how do we actually measure the effect of the skills gap analysis?

• Do we have one group that does the training the old way and a new group that does the training via automated skills gap analysis?
• Do we measure hours spent training the old way and hours spent using skills gap analysis?
• Do we measure learner satisfaction?
• Do we measure knowledge retention?

You get the idea.

If we don’t decide on some way of measuring the effect of the skills gap analysis, the great new idea will be training and technology for its own sake.

Before you spend money on elearning, it’s working out how you will measure its effect. For example:

• how does it mitigate risk?
• how does it effect the bottom line?

Or, more specifically, does it …

• reduce hours lost to recertification training?
• reduce accidents?
• increase productivity (sales, items processed, etc)?
• increase learner satisfaction?

And so on.

Avoiding Making Training an End in Itself

Without some measurable ends like these in mind, ends beyond the training, the training can become an end in itself. Some symptoms of training being an end in itself:

• Employees do the training because they have to, not for a set of good reasons that make sense to them.
• Course materials have no direction. So they seem fluffy, vague and impractical. Theory for theory’s sake. Mostly irrelevant to the work at hand.
• Technology gets used because it’s there. Wow, this skills gap analysis feature sounds great! Is it really?
• And, in any business, the question arises: why are we spending X dollars on training? Is there a good answer? Can we talk dollars and cents? If not, training is seen as a net cost, with no financial upside, and slips down the list of priorities.

So it’s important to decide how you will measure the effect of the elearning project. It’s important to do this in concrete terms.

Before you start the project.

So that a sense of purpose is built into the training materials, the learning management system, the administrative procedures, and so on. And it needs to be toward a reasonable end beyond the training itself.

When someone asks you how the training is going, you can respond with stats, anecdotes and comparative studies; all demonstrating the expenditure is worth it. If it’s not worth it, stop doing it!

Be Careful!

Of course, you don’t want to be a slave to these measurements.

A big question that follows all this:

• What other effects is the training having that aren’t captured in those measurements you decided upon? What actually ends up happening?

It’s worth noting as many of those as you can before you start the project. During the project. And as you go. If these start to become really important, that will change things.

A good way to escape the possibly myopic effects of focusing on particular measurements is to also capture anecdotal evidence from learners. This is all about getting feedback.