Every company wants to achieve its goals with an efficient and productive workforce. To gain this type of success, companies must deploy continuous training to upgrade their teams’ skills, knowledge and abilities. This is why lifelong learning is crucial for organizational growth.

And once you start training employees, it’s critical to track specific metrics to help you assess whether your training program is benefiting the business. These metrics can also help you evaluate whether employees learned the necessary skills and capabilities to perform better in their role. Let’s review 10 key corporate learning metrics every training manager should know.

1.   Training Cost per Employee

Training cost per employee estimates the financial investment for training each individual employee. It’s particularly useful for understanding how much you will spend in training, especially if you plan to deliver multiple training programs.

To calculate this metric, you can divide the total cost of training by the number of employees in a specific program (or all programs together). On the other hand, you can also try estimating this the other way around — calculate how much you will spend on each employee before calculating the total cost of the program.

2.    Training Return on Investment

Training return on investment (ROI) measures training’s success and if the desired objectives have been met. This metric can help you calculate the profitability of your investment in training your employees. Most of the time, you will measure training ROI after seeing the results of your training program.

For instance, if you invested a specific amount into the program and then the employees who completed the program were able to increase revenue, then you can count the investment in your training program as profitable.

3.   Program Enrollment Rate

If you work in a large company, then tracking your program enrollment rate is definitely necessary. That being said, this metric can be useful for small- and medium-sized businesses as well. This metric can give you a better understanding of several things:

• How many of your employees are enrolled in a specific program.
• Which programs are more interesting and popular among your employees.
• How well you communicated information about the programs to your employees.
• Whether your team is interested in completing your training programs.

4.   Learner Drop-off Rate

While it’s important to see how many employees enrolled in any given training program, this metric may not be enough to understand how many of them actually completed the course. There will definitely be some people on your team who will be reluctant to study even if they know it will help them perform better and become more productive.

This is precisely why you need to track the learner drop-off rate. This metric will show you how many employees didn’t stay enrolled.

5.   Learner Engagement

Some employees may enroll in your corporate training program but may not engage with the course. As a result, they don’t learn as effectively. If learning isn’t memorable or engaging, then learners may have a hard time transferring what was learned to their role.

The learner engagement metric can be measured by tracking the application of learned skills or behaviors by the percentage of employees using their new skills following training. It can also be tracked by team productivity and feedback from learners who attended the course. Course completion rates and social engagement in team collaboration apps can also help measure engagement.

6.   Operational Efficiency

When it comes to operational efficiency, you can use two approaches. One is to track the operational efficiency of your training program and how streamlined it was. This has to do with any technical issues or hiccups that could have interfered with learning.

The second approach requires tracking the operational efficiency of your business before and after employees have completed training. In this instance, you would track all the standard metrics (e.g., rate of missed deadlines per employees) before and after your team has completed your training program.

7.   Program Satisfaction Level

Even if you think you know how to optimally train your team, you should still ask your employees for their feedback. You can either ask for feedback face to face or create a survey to track their program satisfaction level.

You can ask questions about the difficulty of the program, whether the topics were interesting, what was lacking, what was redundant and what your employees would like to see in future programs among other things.

8.   Assessment Scores and Pass Rate

There are some metrics that can help you indirectly track your team’s performance throughout the training program (e.g., learner engagement), but there are also metrics like assessment scores and pass rate that are more direct.

Assessment scores are the grades or scores your employees get after being assessed during or after the program (e.g., through tests and quizzes). The assessment pass rate shows how many of your employees successfully passed any given assessment such as a test.

9.   Program Completion Rate

At the end of the program, you will also need to track how many of the enrolled employees successfully completed the training. This will help you make decisions about further adjusting or reworking the program as well as finding solutions for employees who couldn’t keep up with the coursework.

If an employee was enrolled in multiple training programs, then you can also track how many of them they completed for a better understanding of how that specific employee went through the training process.

10. Post-training Employee Performance

Lastly, don’t forget to track employee performance post training. This metric tracks operational efficiency and is more focused on how well your employees are able to apply their new skills and capabilities on the job.

This metric can help you get to know each employee and find out how your training program helped them become better at their job and more productive at work. At the same time, it can also help you identify employees who are currently underperforming and may need additional training.

Final Thoughts

This is definitely not an exhaustive list of all the corporate learning metrics you can use to measure the impact of training. However, by starting with these metrics, you can gain great insight into how your training programs can contribute toward business success.