Using Data to Improve Training Programs

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬? 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐧𝐝. 🏁 I used to think my job as an L&D professional started with a syllabus. I was wrong. Recently, I was tasked with building a learning solution for our Talent Acquisition (TA) team. The goal wasn’t just to "train recruiters"—it was to solve a business problem. Instead of looking at what they needed to know (Level 2), I started with what the business needed to achieve (Kirkpatrick Level 4). The "Reverse" Approach I didn’t start with slides. I started by analyzing Voice of the Customer (VOC) survey results, focusing on various metrics from both Hiring Managers and Candidates. Working Backwards: ✅ Level 4 (Results): I defined the business KPI. ✅ Level 3 (Behavior): Based on the VOC metrics, I identified the specific actions recruiters needed to change—specifically around "Precision Intake" and "Candidate Experience Management." ✅ Level 2 & 1 (Learning & Reaction): Only then did I design the actual training content that addressed those specific behavior gaps. The Result? The training didn't feel like a chore; it felt like a solution. Because I built it based on the actual metrics revealed in the VOC surveys, the TA team saw immediate value, and the business saw a measurable shift in hiring efficiency. The Lesson: If you want your learning solutions to be more than just "check-the-box" exercises, stop asking "What should we teach?" and start asking "What does the data say I need to solve?" How do you use VOC data to shape your enablement programs? 👇 #LearningAndDevelopment #InstructionalDesign #TalentAcquisition #KirkpatrickModel #Enablement #DataDrivenLD #BusinessImpact

From chatbots that personalize microlearning to systems that predict who’s likely to disengage, artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how we train and learn. AI opens new opportunities to improve on some of the challenges with traditional training models such as scalability, personalization and real-time feedback. Core AI applications in the L&D space can be broken down into four categories: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platforms: These tools tailor difficulty, pacing and topics in real time. An AI-enhanced platform can tailor the content to the learner based on their performance trends. Natural Language Tools: These are used to summarize content, create quizzes and provide conversational coaching. These applications can reduce time spent on administrative tasks and increase the focus on building relationships and delivering value. Predictive Analytics: This category of tools help learning leaders identify skills gaps and forecast learner success. Virtual Coaches and Chatbots: These tools reinforce knowledge through spaced repetition and feedback loops. AI-Powered Learning: A Case Study Streamline Services is a fifth-generation plumbing, electrical and HVAC company that handles up to 200 calls a day and serves thousands of customers each month. The company is using AI to not only coach employees but also identify areas where the team needs skills development or training. Streamline adopted an AI-powered virtual ride along platform to help transform everyday customer interactions — both in the field and in the call center — into powerful, data-driven learning opportunities. Traditionally, managers and trainers could only coach based on a handful of ride alongs or recorded calls each month. With AI, every service visit and customer conversation has become searchable, analyzable and coachable. AI highlights key themes including customer concerns, missed opportunities and tone shifts, allowing trainers to see real patterns instead of isolated incidents. The training team and managers use this knowledge to design training and structure coaching for individual needs. Because AI is deepening Streamline’s understanding of customer needs, the L&D team can develop targeted training that improves customer service and empathy across the company. Streamline’s experience illustrates how AI is fundamentally changing the learning process — from reactive coaching based on limited observation to proactive, personalized development powered by real data. This case study showcases how technology can elevate human performance rather than replace it. AI offers the ability to provide more learning opportunities and personalized learning across roles and industries. L&D professionals need to embrace this change and evolve alongside the technology. The future of learning isn’t artificial — it’s intelligently human. #LearningandDevelopment #AI #FutureofLearning

As Instructional Designers, we often track training completion in spreadsheets. But rows and columns rarely show us the real shape of a learning culture. So I used Gephi to model a sample organizational training network. 🔵 Blue nodes: Training topics 🟣 Purple nodes: Employees Each connection represents actual participation, not just assignment. When the data turned into a network, the story became much clearer: 🔹 Hidden silos appeared immediately. A group of employees clustered only around Health & Safety, completely disconnected from core digital topics like Data Security. They are compliant — but isolated. 🔹 “Super Learners” stood out naturally. Employees like Emp #7 emerged as bridges between technical and soft skills. These are not just learners — they are potential mentors, knowledge carriers, and internal champions. 🔹 Core vs. Edge became visible. While Data Security sits at the heart of the learning culture, Leadership training appears at the fringe, signaling a possible disconnect between strategic development and daily learning behavior. This reminded me of something important: Instructional Design is not only about creating content. It is about revealing gaps, breaking silos, and intentionally designing connections. Spreadsheets show who completed what. Networks show who is truly connected to learning. How do you currently look at your training data: as a list — or as a living system?

I was just speaking with the L&D Leader of a multi-billion dollar business who shared their journey to securing the business data needed to prove L&D's impact, a common struggle for many of us. They’d been on both ends of the spectrum: the Fortune 500 company where a high-ranking person refused to share business data and their current role where stakeholders are willing to hand over the data. For L&D professionals, getting access to those business metrics is half the battle. Here is the strategic approach they used to build an indispensable L&D function: 1. Focus on the business's biggest pain points (quantified with data) They targeted major, quantifiable business risks. Their first focus was fixing a massive problem: Ridiculously high turnover in one of the business units. They were also intensely interested in attrition, seeing the correlation between how they were preparing people and the number of people leaving. 2. Deliver wins before asking for the keys They built trust by showing immediate, quantifiable value first, offering to help with no questions asked. This resulted in: - Increasing the production output of new starters by focusing more on the actual work during training - Then shaving weeks off of a multi-month training program for new starters due to greater focus on performance and impact and then asking whether there was a more efficient way of achieving the same results - Which all resulted in business partners sharing more data with them because they saw such a huge impact on their day-to-day work. 3. Mirror the metrics that matter Their team now formally aligns L&D goals with business-driven outcomes. They write goals based on the same business metrics their stakeholders use when meeting with their own teams. Their future goals include things like: - Reduce x amount of time in the classroom - See x amount of proficiency on calls - Achieve x amount of billing 4. Provide proactive visibility (report out constantly) They don't wait for stakeholders to ask for updates. They report out L&D's impact quarterly, transparently and proactively, putting it in the hands of stakeholders. This strategic visibility ensures L&D is never overlooked. This transformation has shifted L&D from a service line that could be cut to a strategic partner that the business says, "We can't live without you". There’s so much to learn from and admire about this L&D leader’s approach, but in a nutshell: You must be married to the business's challenges, not just delivering learning in the hope of affecting them. We're rarely going to be invited to the conversations we want to be in and so we need to take our opportunities, deliver impact, use successes as leverage and reinforce - via our actions - that we are a crucial factor when it comes to driving performance and results.

What happens when it becomes cheap and easy to create, analyze, and personalize training — when learning itself scales effortlessly? We’re about to find out. A friend recently told me about Jevon’s Paradox. It's the idea that the cheaper or easier something gets, the more we use it. Think LED bulbs. They use less energy, so we put them everywhere. Or fuel-efficient cars that end up on the road twice as often. Maybe even therapy. Or am I the only one who asks GPT if I’m the crazy one? That’s exactly where L&D is right now. Content Creation Legacy content creation was slow, expensive, and painful. A parade of learning designers, SMEs, and sign-offs to produce content that ended up so generic it could have been written by Toby from The Office. Now, AI can build relevant, contextual training in minutes. It draws on unlimited knowledge and your internal expertise to deliver something genuine, not another templated snoozefest. But, when creating training becomes frictionless, the world fills with noise. The companies that win won’t be the ones cranking out the most content. They’ll be the ones using the abundance to build in precision. Training that’s sharp, specific, perfectly timed, and delivered where it has the most impact. Needs Analysis For years, we treated needs analysis like a bureaucratic circle… uh… “ritual”. Surveys. Interviews. Decks that were outdated before they hit exec review. A process so full of shi… uh… “robustness” that it was held in reserve for special occasions. Now we can read the business in real time. Dynamic data collection reveals where skills are strong, where performance is weak, and where help is needed *today*, not six months from now. Abundance lets us stop guessing. Precision comes from knowing. Analytics & Feedback Loops Let’s be honest. Butts-in-seats and smile sheets were always stu… uh… “too basic”. Now, analytics show what actually moves the needle, which training shifts behavior, improves confidence and performance, and drives business results. Feedback loops aren’t quarterly anymore. They’re constant. Every interaction feeds the system. Every datapoint sharpens the next experience. That’s how abundance becomes precision. You don’t drown in data. You use it to aim better. The Bottom Line The barrier to creating and delivering training has all but disappeared. That’s not a problem. It’s an opportunity. Because when anyone can build training instantly, the real advantage shifts to leaders who build it with purpose. The leaders who use abundance to create precision. Precision in what we teach. Precision in who we reach. Precision in how it drives performance. That’s the next of learning and development.

Did you know that 92% of learning leaders struggle to demonstrate the business impact of their training programs? After a decade of understanding learning analytics solutions at Continu, I've discovered a concerning pattern: Most organizations are investing millions in L&D while measuring almost nothing that matters to executive leadership. The problem isn't a lack of data. Most modern LMSs capture thousands of data points from every learning interaction. The real challenge is transforming that data into meaningful business insights. Completion rates and satisfaction scores might look good in quarterly reports, but they fail to answer the fundamental question: "How did this learning program impact our business outcomes?" Effective measurement requires establishing a clear line of sight between learning activities and business metrics that matter. Start by defining your desired business outcomes before designing your learning program. Is it reducing customer churn? Increasing sales conversion? Decreasing safety incidents? Then build measurement frameworks that track progress against these specific objectives. The most successful organizations we work with have combined traditional learning metrics with business impact metrics. They measure reduced time-to-proficiency in dollar amounts. They quantify the relationship between training completions and error reduction. They correlate leadership development with retention improvements. Modern learning platforms with robust analytics capabilities make this possible at scale. With advanced BI integrations and AI-powered analysis, you can now automatically detect correlations between learning activities and performance outcomes that would have taken months to uncover manually. What business metric would most powerfully demonstrate your learning program's value to your executive team? And what's stopping you from measuring it today? #LearningAnalytics #BusinessImpact #TrainingROI #DataDrivenLearning

The ROI Mirage : Why Most Learning Teams Still Can’t Prove Impact (and What We Can Do Differently) Every L&D head (and I was there some years ago) I speak to claims they “track impact.” Yet, when I ask a simple question, “So, what’s the ROI of your last leadership program?” There’s silence or a story with no numbers, followed by a nervous smile. The truth? Most learning functions don’t have an ROI problem; we have an intent problem. For years, we’ve mistaken activity for impact: * 95% completion rates * Happy sheets with “great session!” comments * Certification counts These are vanity metrics. They measure consumption, not capability. - We measure what’s easy, not what matters. - We design for satisfaction, not sustainability. - We report in training language, not business language. ROI in learning often fails because: The problem statement is vague. (“We need a leadership program.” For what business shift, exactly?) No baseline exists. (You can’t prove improvement without a ‘before.’) Measurement windows are too short. (Behavioral shifts take quarters, not days/weeks.) Ownership is unclear. (Managers don’t reinforce; HR doesn’t follow through.) Let’s rethink ROI not as “return on investment” but as “relevance, ownership, and integration.” Relevance: Tie every learning initiative to a measurable business lever: cost, quality, retention, or speed. Ownership: Shared responsibility between L&D, business leaders, and learners themselves. Integration: Blend learning metrics with business dashboards. Learning data shouldn’t sit in isolation. Leading organizations globally (think Microsoft, Unilever, DBS Bank) have moved from post-training surveys to “performance-linked learning analytics.” They correlate training exposure with: * Managerial feedback scores * Productivity deltas * Internal mobility rates That’s where true ROI lives; not in an LMS report but in a business P&L reflection. Maybe it’s time to stop chasing ROI formulas and start building learning systems that prove their value without needing to. AND This could be one of the ways for you to get a seat at the table #LearningAndDevelopment #CorporateLearning #LearningStrategy #LearningROI #WorkplaceLearning #CapabilityBuilding

📊 L&D Isn’t Just “Looking at Training Data” — We’re Analysts Who Drive Business Decisions I’ve said before that L&D is far more than instructional design — and one of the most overlooked capabilities we bring is analysis. But here’s the trap I see many learning teams fall into: They try to build their own analytics systems… completely separate from where the business pulls its data. And when that happens? You get beautiful dashboards ❌ with zero credibility ❌ that don’t influence decisions ❌ that don’t match the business view of reality. Because here’s the truth: If L&D wants to be strategic, our data needs to come from the same place the business gets its data. That means looking beyond learning metrics and into the metrics the business actually cares about: 📈 Sales performance 📉 Attrition and retention 🎯 Behavior change in the field ⚙️ Operational efficiency 🤝 Customer experience & NPS 📚 Capability trends & talent pipeline 📞 Contact center performance (callbacks, escalations, first-call resolution) 🧭 Adoption of new tools, tech, and processes Because learning doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you want to prove impact, you must tie learning to outcomes the business is already tracking — not create a parallel universe of data that only L&D looks at. When L&D pulls from the business data stream, something powerful happens: ✅ We speak the same language as executives ✅ We can show where capability is slipping ✅ We can predict workforce risks before they hit ✅ We can measure the real ROI of learning — not just completions ✅ We become a partner in decision-making, not a cost center This is how L&D stops “reporting activity” and starts driving strategy. Executives: 👉 When your L&D team brings you insights, are they tied to the business — or living in a separate learning dashboard that never influences decisions? If you want a strategic learning function, make sure the data they’re using is the same data you're using to run the business.

Training without measurement is like running blind—you might be moving, but are you heading in the right direction? Our Learning and Development (L&D)/ Training programs must be backed by data to drive business impact. Tracking key performance indicators ensures that training is not just happening but actually making a difference. What questions can we ask to ensure that we are getting the measurements we need to demonstrate a course's value? ✅ Alignment Always ✅ How is this course aligned with the business? How SHOULD it impact the business outcomes? (i.e., more sales, reduced risk, speed, or efficiency) Do we have access to performance metrics that show this information? ✅ Getting to Good ✅ What is the goal we are trying to achieve? Are we creating more empathetic managers? Creating better communicators? Reducing the time to competency of our front line? ✅ Needed Knowledge ✅ Do we know what they know right now? Should we conduct a pre and post-assessment of knowledge, skills, or abilities? ✅ Data Discovery ✅ Where is the performance data stored? Who has access to it? Can automated reports be sent to the team monthly to determine the impact of the training? We all know the standard metrics - participation, completion, satisfaction - but let's go beyond the basics. Measuring learning isn’t about checking a box—it’s about ensuring training works. What questions do you ask - to get the data you need - to prove your work has an awesome impact?? Let’s discuss! 👇 #LearningMetrics #TrainingEffectiveness #TalentDevelopment #ContinuousLearning #WorkplaceAnalytics #LeadershipDevelopment #BusinessGrowth #LeadershipTraining #TalentDevelopment #LearningAndDevelopment #TalentManagement #Training #OrganizationalDevelopment

Ever feel like you're drowning in L&D data and don't know where to start? The key isn’t to tackle it all at once, but to start small. One of the biggest challenges in learning and development? Data overload. Too much data. Too many metrics. Too many expectations. The result? We freeze. We say things like, “If we can’t measure ROI perfectly or get all the way through Kirkpatrick’s four levels, why bother?” But as Zsolt Olah, Senior HR Data Analyst at Intel Corporation, highlighted during our recent They Learn, You Win podcast (https://lnkd.in/eMSw_7CA), this mindset misses the point. But the truth is that you don’t have to be in the NBA to play basketball. Start with what you have, improve incrementally and take small, actionable steps to make data work for you. Zsolt shared how he helps L&D teams break free from the “all or nothing” mentality by focusing on starting small. He likens data to a language.  it doesn’t require perfection to communicate effectively. You don’t need to know every formula or master every tool before taking the first step. He shared some practical Steps to overcome data paralysis: 1️⃣ Shift the focus Move away from generic metrics like smile sheets or click rates. Ask questions that matter: “What barriers do learners face on the job?” or “What’s stopping them from applying this knowledge?” 2️⃣ Partner with the business Find one stakeholder who values actionable insights. Start with a pilot project and let your results speak for themselves. 3️⃣ Redefine engagement   Engagement isn’t just clicks or time spent. True engagement happens when learners are motivated, equipped, and ready to act. 4️⃣ Leverage AI wisely As Zsolt says, AI isn’t a shortcut to effective data use. Use it to challenge your thinking by asking, “What am I missing?” Starting small and building momentum is how data becomes less intimidating and more empowering. What’s one small way you’ve used data to improve your L&D strategy? To hear my full conversation with Zsolt Olah, check out the podcast links in the comments below 👇