Employee training is a big part of your business. Your company even has a dedicated learning and development (L&D) department tasked with putting together training programs and making sure that all employees are kept up to speed. In recent years, your company has embraced adaptive learning as an alternative to more traditional business training methods.
Adaptive learning is all the rage these days. The question is this: does it work? It works for a lot of companies that manage to successfully implement adaptive learning technologies and strategies. Still, not every adaptive learning system yields the same results.
Your company may not be happy with the service your learning partner provides. Perhaps your workers would prefer a different learning platform. Here are three ways to tell if it’s time to switch:
1. Employee Performance
The whole point of adaptive learning, as explained by the people behind Fulcrum Labs, is to improve employee performance. The employees who make your company run are ultimately responsible for its success. If their performance is constantly improving, your company is doing well.
Employees who genuinely benefit from adaptive learning perform better as time goes on. They learn new skills that make them better at their jobs. They compile a larger database of knowledge that will give them a better understanding of both their industry and their day-to-day tasks.
Measuring the success of your adaptive learning program starts with an honest look at employee performance. A positive change in performance indicates your training programs are on the right track.
2. Customer Satisfaction
Better performing employees ultimately lead to improved customer satisfaction. So that is the next place to look. Has the implementation of an adaptive learning program translated into happier customers? Has the number of unhappy customers decreased over that same span?
Satisfied customers are a reflection of a company’s overall business practices. This is important to remember because a company can actually achieve a level of satisfaction among customers without ever providing employee training. Just bear in mind that customer satisfaction is not as important a measuring tool as employee performance.
3. Business Outcomes
Finally, improved employee performance and customer satisfaction ultimately lead to better business outcomes. They lead to companies reaching a wider audience and selling more goods and services. They lead to innovation, collaboration, increased revenues, and on and on.
If business outcomes are not changing, training is not achieving its desired purpose. Training could therefore be deficient in any number of ways. For example, maybe training programs seek to teach the right information and skills but present poorly. On the other hand, the presentation might be top-notch while the information and skills are lacking.
Past, Present, and Future
Tying all of this together is the knowledge that employee training rarely remains static. The training programs your company relied on in the past may not be relevant today. Some of them may have been completely abandoned at this point. Likewise, some of what your company is doing today will not be done in the future.
The wonderful thing about adaptive training is that it is flexible enough to account for past, present, and future. The adaptive training model is flexible enough to adapt to both individual learning needs and organizational training goals. Perhaps that’s why so many companies are turning to it.
If your company has embraced adaptive learning for L&D, you need to be able to measure whether or not it is working. Look at employee performance, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes. Then compare all of that information to past training results. That should tell you how you are doing in the present and where you are heading in the future.
2018 ·