The best way to track skill development

If you’ve invested a lot of time and money into employee training, it’s worthwhile thinking about how you’re tracking skill development.

Tracking skill development is really important for the benefit of both your employees and your business. How so?

Well, first of all, tracking the skill development of your employees is the best way to help them build the skill sets they need to succeed. By monitoring professional development for each team member, you can identify any skills gaps that need to be addressed and improve the gap between the skills your business needs and the skills your employees currently have.

Secondly, tracking skill development will also allow you to continually re-evaluate employee training programs as needed, to ensure you’re providing staff with the best possible development opportunities and getting a good ROI on your training investment.

Ready to get started? Here’s everything you need to know about tracking employee skill development and how you can use your Learning Management System to achieve this.

The importance of tracking professional development

First, let’s look at why it’s so important to monitor professional development in your employees. If you’re an employer or manager, you should be taking the time to sit down with each team member, to come up with a personalised action plan that will help them plan for their career.

Having a professional development program in place is the best way to help employees identify the skills they want to build on. These can be role-specific skills, for example graphic design, or skills that are focused more on personal development, such as becoming more resilient to change, responding well to feedback or dealing with challenging situations or people.

Each team member’s professional development program should aim to improve their skills and competencies, helping them to perform well for the business and establish career goals for the future.

Using an LMS to track skill development

Are you already using a Learning Management System for training across your organisation? Did you know you can also use your LMS to monitor and track skill development?

Your LMS platform is most likely full of insightful data that you can be tracking, to really start improving the performance of your team. This data is invaluable when it comes to interpreting the learning habits of your employees, while also showing whether or not the LMS is delivering value to your organisation.

Soon, you’ll be able to build a comprehensive profile of your employee’s learning habits, which you can use to personalise your eLearning materials and create far more effective training courses.

What you should be tracking in your LMS

Okay, so you’re ready to start tracking learning data from your LMS. The first thing you need to do is figure out which data is worth looking at.

Learning Management Systems contain a huge amount of data, so you need to know what’s worthwhile. Here are some of the key areas you should be reporting on.

• Look to see just how many team members are completing the online training courses – your LMS should be able to track completion rates for each staff member.
• Use the data you obtain from your employees’ online assessments to see how they’re tracking – if the majority of your staff are passing the training courses, and getting high scores in online tests, your eLearning courses are likely to be both effective and successful.
• Review employee feedback on the course – here, your LMS is giving you really clear and valuable data that you can use to further improve your courses.

Christopher Pappas, founder of eLearning Industry, believes that the most important feature to look for in a new LMS is reporting and analytics. Pappas suggests inviting online learners to take a pre-assessment before the eLearning course, then using your findings to choose specific activities and modules that best suit their needs.

“eLearning assessment data also gives you the power to identify online learners’ strengths and weaknesses, which you can then use to create personal learning paths,” explains Pappas.

Tracking and interpreting data from your LMS should be a regular and ongoing process. By making constant adjustments to your eLearning courses, you can start getting the best possible results from your training materials and your employees.

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