Measuring the impact and value of skills development
How the right training evaluation can make the case for L&D investment.
12 September 2024
In a recent online roundtable hosted by City & Guilds Client Managers Joe Bell, Gemma Edwards and Sarah Turner, representatives from Nationwide, Pret a Manger and The Oxford Group met to discuss the impact of training on business growth and the best strategies to measure return on investment.
According to research from Gartner 70% of employees feel they have not mastered all the skills that they need to be able to do their jobs, suggesting that there are significant skills gaps across the workforce that organisations need to find a way to close. While recruitment is one way for employers to fill skills needs, identifying the right upskilling and reskilling solutions is vital to meeting organisational needs, futureproofing a workforce and improving employee engagement.
“Really impactful and effective training programmes can underpin the values of an organisation and help them to evolve workplace culture which is really key.”
Joe Bell, Client Manager, City & Guilds
Successfully evaluating training impact
In research completed for the 2023 City & Guilds Training Trends report, learning and development and HR decision makers were found to be significantly less happy with their organisations’ training budget and quality than finance and business leaders. Across the board, staff training was identified as the number one driver for business growth but for HR and L&D departments to be able to justify investment to decision makers they need to be able to show the value of training.
Finding the right way to measure the impact of training can create challenges and each organisation’s needs will be different, but our webinar speakers shared some of their successful strategies for measuring impact to help attendees consider their own evaluations.
Talent and Development Partner for Pret A Manger Daksha Stancilas spoke about the role that managers have to play in evaluating the success of skills development strategies.
“Within our programmes, we have check-ins put into our LMS (learning management system). The managers are trained to have regular one to one check ins where they discuss issues relating to training. How those individuals are performing, what are the gaps that they see? And then the LMS itself will produce a report in terms of key themes that have come out of that data.”
These check-ins and reports can show where there are issues for teams or individuals, indicating gaps in existing training or problems with the transfer of learning from programmes and the feedback from managers and learners can also show where training has been successful.
Sarah Rimmer, Senior Leadership Consultant for Nationwide talked about taking a data focussed approach to evaluation.
“We have no shows, declines, accepts, all of that type of data. We've got everything that you can imagine in terms of the logistics of the programme, and that is all used.”
This data, used in combination with feedback from the managers completing the course and the employees that they are responsible for, shows potential blockers and sticking points throughout the programme and gives an indication of when and how the skills gained are being implemented.
Nationwide targeted cultural and behavioural changes with their people manager programme and Delivery Lead for Leadership Development Kevin Minton explained how using the right tools and information can give real insight into the wider impact of training.
“We have the 360 tool where we're capturing how leaders show up and we use a tool that’s like an ETS (education testing system) as an external platform. It provides a really good gap analysis report which we can round up so we can see some sort of shifts across the organisation level, rather than individual level.”
Maggie Matthews of The Oxford Group emphasised the importance of planning for evaluation in advance.
“What we do with our clients as much as we possibly can is at the define stage before we design or launch anything, we’re really clear about what levers we’re trying to shift. What is it we’re trying to do with this programme? It’s not enough to have something vague like we want them to be better managers, or we want them to have more conversations, we try to pin down some measurable data.”
By setting clear, measurable KPIs before delivery, The Oxford Group can do pre and post training checks, finding two or three key things to track before and after the programme has been completed. This builds a clear picture of whether the training has instilled the right knowledge and skills and improved performance in target areas.
At City & Guilds we view impact measurement as a crucial part of our work, underpinning our purpose of helping people, organisations and economies develop their skills for growth. This includes helping partners and clients measure the impact of their training programmes through our recognition services, enabling more effective evaluation through our Assured process.
We are also committed to measuring our own impact, helping us to ensure that we continue to keep our purpose at the forefront of every activity we undertake while also evaluating the contribution we are making to our customers, learners and society, as detailed in our yearly impact report.
To find out how our team can partner with you on your learning and development strategy visit our website to schedule a free Skills Discovery Session