Let’s face it, data is not always the easiest concept to sell, especially when it comes to getting internal stakeholders on board. We understand the challenges of making the wider data narrative resonate with your team. The truth is, data can often appear intimidating, overwhelming, or even downright boring. Its complexity can leave you feeling lost in a sea of numbers and charts. However, data can engage stakeholders like never before, providing them with insights and evidence to drive success.
Using tools and techniques to get a handle on your data
With the right tools and support, understanding your data can be simpler than you think. In fact, it can provide you with invaluable insights to create incredible learning outcomes. By obtaining the right tools (and techniques) to utilise data effectively, you can improve your learning experiences for individuals and teams. Moreover, you’ll gain the ability to communicate and share results with your peers, leaders, and stakeholders more effectively.
Data is outside many L&D professionals’ comfort zones, but don’t we learn the most when we are outside of our comfort zone?
How can you get your stakeholders to see the benefits?
By prioritising the right insights and focusing on learner outcomes, there are some key benefits that your stakeholders will not be able to ignore.
5 ways data can be powerful (and fun!):
1. Data can help you see things differently
Often in the workplace, we can easily get caught up in the daily grind and forget to take a moment to take stock, reflect and question how we’re doing things. By analysing data we can find insights that challenge our assumptions and help us truly understand how the learner (or customer) is behaving right now. Famously, established brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsi have a long history of using data to understand and predict consumer tastes. Data can help us see into the future and prepare for what our learners need and want.
2. Data can be used to persuade, educate and inspire learners
Marketing teams worldwide understand the power of data and statistics in persuading customers to take action. Just take a look around any city, and you’ll see billboards and outdoor ads packed with compelling stats, urging people to pay attention. Similarly, data can be a potent tool internally to captivate your colleagues and enhance your learning experiences. Imagine using peer data within a course to reveal how others in the organisation answered a specific question. Did they choose the same option? This not only sparks new ways of thinking but also creates memorable content that keeps learners engaged and inspired. Let data be the driving force behind your learning journey, just as it is in the world of marketing.
3. Data can provide you with useful benchmarks to improve on
To see progress, we need benchmarks and goals. It’s essential that we put benchmarks and goals in place to measure if we’ve improved from each learning experience to the next. Adjust your benchmarks as you learn more, but having a point of comparison will help you as you try new things and develop your courses. External factors may affect certain organisations too, so it may be worthwhile to flex these goals depending on the situation. Ultimately though, benchmarks can provide focus and a real baseline to improve and move forward.
4. Data can surprise you in the decision-making process
We understand that there are many tricky decisions to make in L&D departments, from resources to budget to deliverables. When considering your learning outcomes though, we urge you to use your data to aid your decision-making process. Have you considered all your competence-based data? Have you measured attendance and engagement? Have you seen a rise in confidence in your workforce? All these factors (and more) are important data points that can lead you onto making exciting and game-changing decisions that could really impact your learners.
5. Data can help you identify challenges and problems
Data can also reveal what isn’t working and help anticipate future problems or challenges. For instance, you might notice a decline in attendance for certain programmes, decreasing completion rates in specific sessions, or a drop in engagement levels instead of improvement. These changes indicate the need to adapt or refresh the programmes to achieve better results and outcomes. It’s best to foresee potential problems before they become too tricky to solve. By carefully and intelligently analysing data, you can proactively identify challenges and prevent potentially detrimental or time-wasting experiences.
How can we help you take the next steps with your learning content analytics?
If you’ve read this far it’s a good bet you’re already convinced that data is the fuel you need to create amazing learning outcomes. And you now have some compelling arguments to convince your stakeholders too.
We understand that navigating and nurturing data can be a minefield for busy L&D departments. That’s why we created Kineo Analytics to support L&D teams to feel both comfortable and excited by their data insights. Kineo Analytics is included with our Adapt courses as standard, and helps you use your data in the best way possible – to improve your learner’s experiences and outcomes.
There are 4 main data dimensions that Kineo Analytics embraces:
- Competence: This is all about applied knowledge. It’s essential to measure your learner’s ability to apply knowledge in realistic scenarios and/or exercises.
- Perception: This is about measuring a true change in the learner. This could be through set outcomes or newly acquired skills. It could also be about an increase in confidence from the learner, from before and after the learning experience.
- Engagement: This is all about measuring how the learner interacts with the learning. Engagement data measures how learners both interact with and complete the learning.
- Reaction: This is an area most L&D teams are very familiar with, measuring a learner’s opinion or feelings about their learning. Reaction data is typically collected via “smile sheets”, asking for feedback from the learner on completion of the course.
Next steps
We know that data is the fuel behind most business decisions. That’s why we’ve created our guide ‘Building a data-driven learning organisation’ to help you set the foundation for a learning analytics programme in your organisation, and identify the steps to take today. Download the guide today, or get in touch with our friendly team to discuss your options.