Ever wondered what small adaptations to your online courses and training delivery can bring you a higher training Return on Investment (ROI)?

In this article, we will share with you how you can use online courses and LMS to supercharge your training ROI.
How to make the most (impact) with the least possible financial resources?
If you are working in HR, learning and people development this is a question you have surely asked before. We all have. We all want the investments we make to be worthwhile for our company, and with many priorities in the organisational agenda we have to make wise choices.

What is ROI?

ROI is the return on investment that a company or organisation makes. It is determined by taking into consideration the costs incurred (investment made) and Return (the benefits/ value) accumulated.

Any kind of learning initiative, either face-to-face or online, should be able to demonstrate gains that are more than the investment. And an increasing amount of the workforce is more and more keen on learning.

Learning has been mentioned as a key reason for people wanting to join and to stay longer in companies. It constitutes a core retention factor, with 94% of employees stating in a LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report they would stay longer if the company invested in their development.

Ensuring training generates a reasonable Return on the Investment (training ROI) enables you to show how training and online courses has resulted in benefits to your employees and your company.

Read more on How to calculate training ROI.

Therefore, you need to capitalise on the training you offer your staff while keeping your budget in check, and to diversify your offer by offering online courses to respond to the needs of your staff.

5 Ways to Supercharge your online training ROI

There are 2 important aspects to consider if you want to supercharge your training ROI: the quality of the online courses you offer, and the delivery of your courses (how you offer them). One without the other will always keep you at a loss.

If you have an excellent Learning management system (LMS) but your content and online courses are not appealing or engaging to staff you will likely have low completion rates and lack of applicability. If you already have highly engaging and effective online courses and eLearning content but your LMS or training management system is outdated or not adapted to your needs anymore your learners will probably run from it. In this case you (and your staff) will likely experience frustration with the system and learning metrics that are a step too far from what you need.

The following 5 tips can boost your training ROI by focusing on online learning quality and quality of delivery:

1. Think about problems and solutions

Identify what kind of problems and opportunities your business has and how training can help you address them. These need to be high-impact points for your company, meaning these have a clear impact on the business. Once you have this you can create your content on this topic, and start thinking about the learning experience for your staff members.

Choosing the right factors to measure, both before and after training, enables you to show how training has resulted in benefits to your employees and your company.

Let’s use an example with Onboarding:

You are increasing your workforce and the nature of your company’s work requires highly qualified staff. You have noticed new staff members are already highly qualified when recruited yet take a long time to understand your company culture, ways of functioning and working processes. This leads to errors and it takes time for newcomers to ramp up towards full proficiency in tasks. In overall it all results in lost productivity (also financially).

In this case we could summarise the problem, the solution and the metrics to monitor as:

→ Problem: unprepared staff take longer to perform
→ Solution: Onboarding online programme to support new staff members acquire skills and workplace processes quicker
→ Metrics and indicators to monitor: Time-to-performance | Productivity loss | Task-performance level   | Impact and number of errors |Cost of onboarding programme

2. Use collaborative learning

Start using a platform which hones collaboration in learning. The 70-20-10 model highlights that nearly 20% of our learning happens from working in collaboration with others (through interactions, feedback, observation and working directly with our co-workers). The 70-20-10 rule emerged from CCL’s Lessons of Experience research and is still nowadays one of the most used models.
Providing a platform where social learning is core will facilitate learning and increase applicability to the workplace. This means including collaborative learning activities as part of your curriculum.
What we have noticed with clients using our LMS is that they created an average of 22% more collaborative and practice activities because the learning management platform is designed to consider and include them as key in online learning.
To harvest the potential of social learning consider creating learning groups according to each topic or online course, give your staff task, to work collectively on an assignment, allow people to share info and resources, and let people join and contribute to whatever group they want.

Taking on the onboarding example mentioned above, you could give new staff members access to your company’s community so they can ask questions, read information, and increase their knowledge with real interactions with colleagues.

3. Reduce online learning courses production time

We all know it takes time to create an online course. If you are working on a course that is critical for your company you want to have it set and ready to launch as soon as possible right? Get it too late and it might no longer be needed.
To create learning content faster you can work on two fronts: use rapid-development eLearning techniques to create online learning courses faster; and use a training management platform that speeds content creation.
Many learning management systems are designed to be agile so that once you have your content – you can create your online course in minutes. And the design can be so intuitive you can do it without any previous eLearning or online course development experience.

4. Design for applicability

In the end what will give you a higher ROI is when people can apply what they have learned back to their work. Therefore, you need to design for applicability, by creating engaging and user-friendly practice activities and resources people can use on the go (such as learning aids, checklists, Tips and tricks, how-to quick guides).
A quality Learning Management system allows you to include all types of resources, and to diversify learning activities so they are anchored in practice. You can also collect rapidly metrics to assess reactions and the learning of your staff. Include assignments and case-studies and you can observe changes in decision-making and behaviour for participants. And remember, the more your staff practices, the better their changes of hitting the target.

5. Ally efficiency with cost reduction on online delivery
   
   

Last but not least, to maximise ROI we need to think efficiency: bringing just-in-time learning to the employees at point of need, ensuring its applicable and has a high impact (question of design). But being efficient also means choosing the best delivery method within the best budget. Online platforms are usually expensive; hence not always accessible to smaller companies.
Nevertheless there are now options for smaller-sized companies with online learning platforms costs such as Advance LMS costing as little as a cup of coffee (2€ month per employee). Money is no longer an obstacle for companies to take their training online.
We hope you enjoyed this article on easy to apply ideas to supercharge your training ROI.  Now we want to hear from you: which technique from this article are you most excited to try?

Let us know by leaving a quick comment.

Because we believe in making learning accessible, we have created Advance. Advance is a Learning Management System with a twist: a scalable and robust platform, yet fully customisable and anchored in social learning.
Advance is the training management platform for online learning  you have been waiting for. It is a complete and integrated online learning delivery solution, suitable for companies, training centres, non-profits, universities and schools.  Because pricing is competitive even companies with a very small budget can benefit from it!

If you would like to see how Advance can take your company into the future of learning, get in contact.