Business success comes down to the skills and strengths of the people who work there. As a result, employees are among the most valuable assets any company has.

With the country’s labor shortage continuing in full steam and employee turnover reaching a level most companies would find alarming, keeping top talent is a priority. To hold on to their brightest and best, companies are increasingly offering flexible work schedules, benefit upgrades and, in some cases, a four-day workweek.

But there is something employees value even more than perks like these: learning new skills and putting them to use. According to LinkedIn’s 2022 Workplace Learning Report, employees who feel that their skills are not being utilized are 10 times more likely to look for a new job than those who think their skills are being put to good use.

It’s up to company leaders to know which skills their employees possess and ensure they are best utilized in their day-to-day work. They must also know which workers want to learn new skills and help them do it. It’s imperative for executives to understand where the skill gaps exist in their organization, especially if they intend to enter a new market or otherwise pivot the business.

All the information company leaders need to retain top talent resides in the training department of the business. This information can do far more than optimize training programs or help the training department reap the best possible return on investment (ROI). When learning analytics are applied to training data — and training data is connected to other organization functions — they yield insights that help the whole enterprise.

Point Solutions vs. Learning Analytics

Training data is the best-kept secret in many businesses. Viewed as information that is valuable only to training departments, it is often kept separate from finance, human resources (HR), compliance and the C-Suite.

Why is this the case? Because companies frequently make smaller training investments, buying a single piece of software or tool that can show ROI. For example, did the learning management system decrease the time to build and deliver training courses? Did your new enrollment software increase enrollment completion rates? Learning technologies offered as point solutions show how investments in infrastructure benefit the training department exclusively.

Investing in learning analytics is the way to create a data model that connects to every department of an organization and serves up valuable insights on a company’s most valuable asset: its people. Training programs influence a company’s productivity and factor directly into which employees stay and leave.

Boat manufacturer Boston Whaler, for example, once faced the challenge of hiring, onboarding and training many new employees for their manufacturing operations, which the company needed to do quickly. But many new hires — all of whom entered intensive training programs — were leaving the company. As a result, turnover became a significant obstacle as Boston Whaler attempted to scale up.

The training technology that the company was using did not integrate with Boston Whaler’s other business functions, which meant that company leaders had little insight into why so many new hires were leaving.

Digitizing their training data, using learning analytics to study it and integrating with other functions at the company revealed gaps and imperfections in the training program. When these were remedied, employee retention rates improved.

The Right Analytics

Boston Whaler is just one of many companies that have learned how training data can increase ROI for a whole organization once it is analyzed and integrated with other company departments. Other businesses, however, are still trying to determine what kind of learning analytics will bring valuable insights that can apply beyond the training department.

As businesses like these go beyond point solutions and invest in new data architecture, they should look for learning analytics that:

• Connect training data to other organizational functions, providing valuable insights about workforce capability that would have otherwise been siloed within training.
• Use machine learning to streamline and optimize training operations, turning training departments into lean operations instead of cost centers.
• Scale and adapt to allow the training function to rapidly change course in an ever-changing market. This provides a high degree of resilience to the whole company by getting in front of skill gaps, identifying talent needs far in advance and providing insight into how to pivot the business or enter new markets.

The training department has a wealth of information about people who, more than anything else, will determine the future course of a business. But this information falls by the wayside in far too many organizations when it should inform decisions at the highest level.

Among its other benefits, training data can show company leadership whether employees are really using their skills or are likely to leave the company. For many companies, integrating and using training data will mean winning the war for talent.