Top HR Tools to Track Progress of Employee Learning and Development Programs

Did you know that global tech behemoth IBM spends $574+ million annually on its internal employee training and development programs? How much are you spending on your organization’s employee training and development?

It took IBM decades to establish its value system for training and development, and its “Nine IBM Competencies” are widely researched in the HR domain. But, not every company can establish these competencies in a short time, especially when the paradigm of talent management has changed completely in the last few years. That’s why organizations are increasingly looking at Cloud software solutions for their employee training and development initiatives.

A large number of organizations, mostly based in North America now understand the importance of involving Employee Learning and Development programs with the existing human resource management practices.  Workplace training trends have evolved significantly in the Cloud era where employers are spending more than $1300 USD per employee every year. Despite a remarkable uptick in the HR budgets for training, learning and training programs (TLD) in recent years, employers are uncertain about the tangible benefits of such models. Companies are not only spending more cost-wise on TLD programs but also setting aside longer hours annually just to train employees.

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A part of this problem lies with the way companies design their TLD programs and seldom take the support of any tools. However, things are changing for good now.  Today, organizations are not hesitant about investing in technology to improve an employee’s skills, knowledge, and competency, which all come together in improving the overall performance at the workplace. In remote working cultures, the importance of TLD can’t be overlooked either.

In this article, we focus on the best HR Tools for tracking employee learning and development at the workplace.

Here are some of the best cloud-based software you can consider to track employee learning and development:

iSpring Learn – A platform that allows for embedding content beyond videos and plain text. Interactive courses, video lectures, communication simulations, and advanced assessments can all be made use of with iSpring’s authoring toolkit.

Docebo – A flexible platform where you can customize everything from the course catalog to the colors for the mobile app. It also offers extensive localization. It is especially useful for companies that train employees belonging to different nationalities since it is available in 40 languages.

Apart from this, Docebo offers Coach and Share that encourages informal social learning by way of sharing insights, guides, videos, etc., or approaching subject-matter experts with your questions.

LearnUpon – A platform useful for both internal employee training as well as external partner training. The interface is extremely user-friendly and with its advanced plans, you can benefit from features like gamification, switching between learning portals, facilities for blended learning and more. 

Litmos – Over 15,000 learning courses can be accessed on Litmos Heroes under the SAP Litmos system. Also, the built-in editor offers you to create basic eLearning content without having to spend on producing training content and hiring instructional designers.

TalentLMS – This platform is distinguished by its amazing gamification settings. Bonus content is hidden only for learners who have reached a specific level in the course. TalentLMS also has integrations with PayPal, Trello, Zapier, WordPress and other such third-party services providing an overall environment rich with varied services in a single place.

Trainual: Trainual is another popular HR technology tool for knowledge management, employee training, onboarding, and SOPs. This modern employee training SaaS tool allows users to assign new policies or push updates to the entire team using cust0mized ready-to-use templates and drag-and-drop features. It also offers seamless integration with other employee collaboration and HR management tools such as BambooHR, Justworks, Slack, Zenefits, and so on.

Each LMS comes with a unique set of features and plans. Many companies worldwide have L&D departments that run on LMSs to operate the training programs for the workforce and assess their current skill levels. In other companies, HR professionals are the ones who handle the training content and the assessments. Finally, the training businesses are businesses that rely on LMSs to provide learning courses on their platform. 

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The LMS that can gather relevant statistics and compile it into reports allows the entire team to view their performance directly at any time. There are 3 major parameters that can be tracked with a good LMS: 

• How learners are interacting and progressing with the content
• The courses, quizzes, scores, attempts and time spent by an employee
• The attendance of team members attending online and offline classes and training sessions

The metrics for tracking employee L&D get tracked all at one place with the use of LMS. But what must definitely be tracked apart from the scores/progress?

1. Course progress – Though completion is important, the rate at which an employee is learning matters a lot. When an employee is taking too long to complete a course, support is required, or when a certain section of the course proves hard for employees, the difficulty level of the same needs to be reviewed. 
2. Completion rates – The completion of specific training that employees undergo for performance or legal purposes, like onboarding and compliance training needs to be noted to decide their next learning requirement. Listing certificates in employee training logs is of help here other than tracking it on spreadsheets.
3. Employees who need re-training – On failing to achieve required assessment scores, employees need to go for retraining. Keeping a training tracing database and automated reminders after certain periods to refresh the learning is useful.

Conclusion

Focusing on employee learning and development is just half the work done. Monitoring results, i.e. tracking their performance will deliver the actual results – whether they are learning what they are supposed to. Enter tracking software that makes the entire monitoring process less of a hassle with dozens of paper reports and spreadsheets! Companies that spend more on TLD programs are found to have improved employee engagement that eventually supports overall career growth, higher productivity, and resilience in tough market conditions. TLD systems also provide an effective platform to expand on the Learning Management Systems to provide online learning/training to staff, partners and customers. 

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]