You may have a few vague goals in mind for your courses and learning, but do you have real and structured goals as part of your learning and development plan set in place? It’s one of the things we’re always talking to customers about and for good reason! Setting goals and knowing exactly what to measure, and how to measure it, is incredibly powerful and will deliver significantly better outcomes than not having them. The saying ‘what gets measured, gets done’ is especially true when it comes to your learning.
Setting measurable goals is essential to optimising your learning to be the best it possibly can be for your learners. If you’re not measuring your courses against objectives and goals, then you’re likely to completely miss any mistakes or obstacles in courses that are preventing people from taking in the information or skills you want them to from a course. And if people aren’t learning from the course, then they’re just taking the course for the sake of it, which is a waste of everyone’s time!
For example, a course may be taking learners a long time to complete or has a high number of failed quiz attempts, which could mean a question may be difficult to understand or is not worded properly in the course. But if you’re not regularly measuring this data against your goals, then this wouldn’t be something that’s flagged up quickly, and may be some time until you realise, leading to more work down the road to fix the issue.
However, you don't just set your goals, wait a few weeks or months and then report back. It has to be done on a regular basis, which is why having interim goals, as well as final larger goals, is also really important. Think of them as your checkpoints. This way, if a problem does crop up, you can deal with it there and then rather than only being made aware of it at the end of the year when your reports are due!
With the Upskill People learning platform, we recognise and appreciate just how important having measurable goals are, which is why we’ve made it easy and simple to do this on the platform. We provide accessible and digestible reporting data for your courses, as well as post-course survey data for an even more detailed look at the progress and success of your courses.
There are three levels to setting measurable goals on the Upskill People platform – basic reporting data, post-course survey data, and linking your goals to wider business impacts.
First level: Setting and measuring goals based on reporting data
Goal 1 – Completion rates
The first thing to look at when setting up goals for your learning is how many people are completing the courses? What would you consider a successful rate?
Any percentage will drive an improvement, but we would suggest looking for an 80% completion within 2 weeks of deploying the course. This percentage goal is dependent on the course type though, as some courses may not be completely driven by completion rates, i.e your wellbeing courses, so may have a lower percentage than another course type.
You can always extend this time period if needed, but remember to set interim goals on a regular basis, for example weekly or bi-weekly, so you know you’re on track with learners completing their learning.
You’re probably wondering, well how do I make sure people are completing their courses? And this is where you’ll need more of a marketing hat on! To drive completion towards your goals you need to think of any learning initiative as you would a product launch. People need to know about it first, especially to make them aware that a given course now exists and needs completing. So, promote your courses ahead of their release, then during gather feedback and spread the word, get people talking. This is what will drive your learners to the courses as they clearly know 'why' they are being asked to complete the courses, and what the benefits are to them.
As well as having learners saying great things to others who are yet to be upskilled, a bit of peer pressure can also work wonders. But don't be tempted with the league table name and shame approach. Rather than highlight (and shame) those who haven’t yet completed the courses, celebrate those teams that have. We promise it works! A weekly or monthly email from the CEO congratulating those with the highest completion rates can have a huge impact. Celebrating those who are doing great will also highlight those who are lagging behind slightly without actively naming them, meaning you’re still likely to get that push on your completion rates.
You’ll also want to consider what your tolerance, or 'wiggle room', will be for your goals. What level or rate below your goal would be considered as needing urgent action? But don’t just focus on the negative side of things when it comes to your tolerance. There’s also the positive side of your goal range, or your ‘stretch target’, where levels have exceeded your expectations. And this is the time to really celebrate success and communicate it.
On top of your standard completion rates, you’ll also want to consider what your goal will be for learners passing your courses. For a course that could have a significant impact, this is likely to be 100%. However, for some courses, such as wellbeing courses, you may want to take a slightly more relaxed approach with a goal of an 80% pass rate.
We would not suggest having a goal lower than an 80% pass rate for your courses, especially as our courses all have detailed question by question feedback at the end with signposting, to let the learners know where to go and find the topic that they need to recap to answer the particular question.
Goal 2 – Duration of completion of courses
So, you’ve looked at your course completion rates and set a measurable goal but that’s not the end. Next, we turn to how much time is invested into each course. It’s one of the first things to think about when delivering a new course, because as we all know time is money!
When you decide to upskill your team, you need to consider how much of their time the business wants to invest in them achieving the learning outcomes required. Regardless of if you are buying courses or building your own content, you need to agree with the business leaders what kind of time is acceptable. And this is where your second goal will stem from.
Even with a 10-minute course like our wellbeing ones, this would represent 167 hours of learning for a team of 1,000 people. Now, if they took 15 minutes on this course, instead of 10, that would involve an extra 83 hours the business didn't expect or plan for. This is why this goal is something to monitor closely. Every course is different, and will require a different duration, so keep an eye on this especially during the initial weeks of deployment.
Similar to the first goal, you’ll want to set tolerance levels for this goal too. We would suggest 20% either side of your goal is a good range to aim for.
What does it mean if you are outside of your goal range? Well, if learners are breezing through the first time, and courses are taking a shorter amount of time than you anticipated, then perhaps your learners genuinely do already have the knowledge and skills. It might be worth thinking about changing the content of a given course or potentially making it a little more complex if people are finding it quite easy. Another possible reason is they may have been rushing to get it done. No matter how much interactivity there is (and there should be a lot to engage the learner!), the temptation is always there for some.
On the other hand, you’ll also want to pay close attention to courses that are taking significantly longer to complete. And if a significant amount of your learners are taking longer to complete a given course, then you have a pattern. A pattern that may indicate that some of your content or questions in that course aren’t being understood by learners, likely due to inadequate information or questions not being worded well.
Having a measurable goal for this means you’ll be able to spot these issues quite quickly and be able to work to solve them quickly too. Through analysing the data and seeing where learners are slipping up in courses, you can work out if a question may need a re-write or if a section needs explaining more thoroughly. Without a goal, you’ll end up having to explain to business leaders in your end of year reports why some courses exceeded the agreed course duration, so best to know about this a lot earlier on!
Goal 3 – Number of attempts at passing the quiz
Another goal to be set using the reporting data on the platform is measuring the number of attempts learners are taking to pass the quiz on a course. Learners can’t complete a course until they’ve passed the quiz, so you’ll want to look at just how many times did it take them to pass the quiz.
If people are only passing after multiple attempts, for example more than the average of 2.5, that indicates they’ve not digested and learned what they need from the course and are simply repeating the quiz until they get a pass. They’ve still technically ‘completed’ the course, so the completion rates would be fine, but they haven’t really learned anything which is the whole point of them doing a course!
On the other hand, if you’re finding that most of your learners are passing the course quiz on the first attempt, it’s likely an indication that the quiz is a little too easy and people can guess some of the answers. And this would also be something to flag with whoever is creating and building the courses in your organisation, so that they can go back and re-write the quiz to make it more challenging for your learners.
This is why having a series of measurable goals is so important because just by looking at the completion rates, you wouldn’t realise that there’s a problem with the learning.
For pass attempts, we always look for a range of between 1.5 and 2.4 as an average with anything more being a sign there’s a problem in that course.
Second level: Setting and measuring goals based on post-course survey data
The next level for your measurable goals is looking at your post-course survey data. The Upskill People platform provides a wealth of feedback survey data to look at and analyse, and it’s something we’re always telling customers about! You have data in the form of:
- Completion Reports - A simple calculation of how many people have the survey available to them, and how many have then gone on to submit their survey answers.
- Question by Question Analysis - Each survey question has a list of options, so the person taking the survey can pick any option as they see fit. This analytical tool details, by option for each question, the total number of responses and as a percentage of the overall results.
- Free Text Export - Some surveys will allow people to enter their own comments.
Well-considered post-course surveys can tell you how your people feel about their learning, if they learned anything, and what they may have found more difficult. It’s feedback that’s essential to ensuring your courses are the best they can possibly be.
When someone's just finished a course on a particular topic, they are thinking about it and it's the best time to ask for those little ideas that add up to a big difference. Another of our clients summed this up perfectly when they said: "It's like 100 little light bulbs going off that we wouldn't have otherwise seen". We capture the thoughts when they are still in the moment before they head off to their next task and forget to write it down or communicate it.
Measurable goals against all this survey data are hugely important for staying on track of your learning. With this level of goal setting, you’ll need to decide what sort of numbers you’d expect to be responding positively to the courses, and go from there.
In terms of goals and their ranges, we would suggest a goal of anything above 80% positivity is a success, and anything above 90% a significant achievement that will have a dramatic positive impact on learning and the wider business.
Third level: Linking learning goals to wider business strategy
And now we’ve reached the third and top-line level of goal setting. This level is all about the bigger picture. It’s looking at the wider business strategy and impact and linking the learning and upskilling to other business goals and objectives. The question to really think about on this one is what did the learning actually do for the business?
The whole aim with upskilling and developing your team is to have a larger positive impact on the business in some way. You’re giving people the knowledge and skills to be the best they can possibly be in their professional life. And this is why L&D is of the highest value to businesses as every organisation wants their people to be at the top of their game doing effective and efficient work.
Effective L&D can have several impacts on the business, some examples include:
It could have a financial impact, for example the increase of sales and profit that has some correlation to learners taking customer or sales-related courses.
It could have an impact on customer loyalty, for example the increase in positive customer feedback and return customers that can be traced back to management or sales-related courses.
It could lead to a decrease in health and safety issues in the workplace as people are properly informed and trained up on the topic.
Employee wellbeing could vastly improve through great wellbeing and management courses. Wellbeing is increasingly important in business, as employees who are happy and feel valued in the workplace will have more drive and motivation in their work.
Setting these larger goals for your learning will allow you to measure how your L&D feeds into the wider business strategy, and if any changes or new courses are needed along the way. It will also give you incredibly valuable data and information to take back to business leaders or CEOs to show them the fruits of their investment, which could then lead to more investment and expansion in employee learning.
Summary
Recognising that your upskilling investment goes beyond just deploying the courses means you manage your risk and are much more likely to shine and achieve success. You want your L&D to be proactive rather than just reactive. In the end, you get out what you put in! If you simply make a course available and leave it at that, you’re unlikely to get the same results you would get if you regularly measured your courses against set goals.
So, why not set your goals today and test your current learning against them to see what you’re doing really well, but also where there are areas of improvement to be made.
You might also find these guides useful:
Understanding Analyse overall performance
Viewing individual learner performance