Do you really know what your employees know? You might say, “Of course. Here’s a list of all the courses everyone in the company has completed along with associated test scores.” That’s a fair response. But does this really mean your employees know the content? Do you really know if they have been able to remember it and apply it correctly in their roles? And do you really know if they have been given the right information in the first place to optimize their job performance and achieve specific business outcomes? Unless you measure employee knowledge ongoing and track the application of this knowledge over time against key business objectives, you probably don’t have a good grasp on what your employees know.

Every single thing a company does results from the knowledge that resides in each employee. Employees can’t achieve the right outcomes if they don’t take the right actions. And they can’t take the right actions if they don’t have the right knowledge. So, it’s imperative that you know exactly what your employees know and don’t know to achieve desired results.

Historically, L&D has focused on creating and distributing training material to meet perceived needs. Common success measures have included things like, course completions and training satisfaction scores. But, the problem is that none of these things showcases how training impacts business goals. And that has to change, not only for the sake of elevating L&D within the organization, but for the overall good of the business.

Every other business unit in an organization is accountable for achieving results that tie directly to meeting overall corporate objectives. If the corporate goal is to sell more product, for example, marketing must showcase how its initiatives result in pipeline opportunities that generate sales, sales must state how many deals it closed, and product development must report on the features it delivered that were deemed necessary to make the sales number. So why should L&D be excluded from this kind of rigorous measurement and accountability?

For L&D to become a strategic asset for moving the business forward, learning leaders need to change the way they think about learning and implement it in the workplace. Here’s how:

Work backwards from the overall business objective

With the evolution of technology, it’s now feasible for L&D to tie training efforts to what the business is trying to achieve. But, to do this, first L&D leaders need to shift their mindset and their approach. Instead of focusing on the front end (the training content they think employees need), they need to start at the back-end (the business outcome) and work backwards to identify the specific and measurable items that can be impacted by building employee knowledge.

Think of a sales team. Let’s say everyone on the team is required to increase their quota by 10 percent. Instead of just shoving a ton of content down reps’ throats and hoping the relevant stuff sticks, L&D needs to follow these seven steps:

1. Start with the end goal (the quota) and determine the content that will help reps achieve this goal.
2. Create microlearning training modules around specific topics that managers believe will be valuable. Perhaps, in this case, it’s specific selling techniques or more product info.
3. Give reps the opportunity to take training for a few minutes each day (ideally through a learning software platform), whenever they have time.
4. Track individual knowledge growth in each topic and provide additional training where recall or understanding of the content is weak (this can be done automatically through a learning software platform).
5. Work with managers to track knowledge application on the job to identify areas where reps need more coaching (and input this information into the learning software tool).
6. Use the software to measure knowledge growth and job actions against business objectives to determine business impact and report it to the business.
7. Tweak content to continually optimize results and help sales reps meet or exceed the quota target.

Partner with the business

Learning leaders can’t make this shift alone. They need to join forces with business unit leaders to understand the opportunities and challenges they’re facing. If the goal is to increase sales quotas by 10 percent, L&D needs to get to the heart of the knowledge and behavior barriers that are causing sales reps to fall short of meeting this goal. Similarly, if sales reps are achieving this goal, L&D needs to help increase performance even further by working with business unit leaders to identify gaps in knowledge that may be hindering employees and then design a program to boost learning in this area.

Swap one and done for create and update

It has been common practice in L&D to develop a curriculum that remains static for the long term. But, to tie specific learning initiatives to key business outcomes, agility is crucial. To achieve a desired outcome, L&D needs to track what’s working and not working on a regular basis in order to make changes that will help achieve the result. It is a constant process of reviewing and then adjusting the training material, until it is fully optimized.

Clearly, L&D has a huge opportunity to enable the strategic imperatives of the organization. It’s time to truly figure out what employees don’t know, and be held to the same measurement standards as other parts of the business.

Carol Leaman is the president and CEO of Axonify.