With L&D heads reporting that leadership wants a data-driven approach from them and learning analytics moving to the front and center of the new L&D skillset, it becomes really important to answer this question: How should you, as a learning professional, talk to the business about data?
Perhaps the best starting point for working out how you can offer value to the business through your engagement with learning analytics is to start by looking at things from the point of view of your internal customers. What does the business actually want and need from you?
To begin with, let’s be clear about what we mean by learning analytics in this context.
What is learning analytics?
Learning analytics can be defined as the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learning activities. There is much more to using data than just reporting what happened with learning activities in the past. It can also lead to predictive and prescriptive analytics, which make more active uses of data to predict what will happen in the future and to map out learning paths. But generally, when people talk about learning analytics, they are looking to find out what happened with a given intervention and why it happened.
What does the business want from learning analytics?
In order to understand where learning analytics ‘fits’ in the organizational context, it helps to have a clear-cut view of how businesses use their operating data; the management information (MI) that gets reported on at meetings where decisions are made.
The rhythm might vary in different organizations according to scale, ownership, geographical spread, seasonality, and other factors, but generally businesses live tax year to tax year, quarter to quarter, and most have some kind of monthly reporting round. The higher up the tree you go, the more data-driven the meetings are where these reports get reacted to and discussed.
Some of this data is business-critical (and therefore often confidential). Some data are of less pressing interest. Generally, the more business-critical, confidential, and threat- or opportunity-laden the data are, the more interesting they look to business leaders. Financials generally come first priority, followed often by sales. HR has data on churn and other people metrics, a subset of which may be training data. There’s a pecking order of time and attention.
4 tips for making learning data part of business analytics
1. Things the business cares about is a moving target. What the business needs to know about in any given year, quarter, or month will change with the situation it finds itself in and the new priorities shaped by events often out of its control.
2. Information about the past is only of compelling interest to the extent that it can help the business grapple with critical issues it faces right now and for the future.
3. The business doesn’t want to see your workings out. If you only measure outcomes you might know that learning succeeded, but not why it succeeded (or didn’t). But while it is really important for you as a learning professional to have working metrics that examine every critical stage of the process, the business may only be interested in final outcomes. For example, ROI, a measurable change in performance or behaviour, and even a reduction in risk.
4. There are dangers in relying too heavily on dashboard data. Dashboard data is static and inert in character. It tells us about the present, but nothing about the future or what we should do about it.
Leadership teams are always looking to identify levers that can change some aspect of the business. This could be to reduce attrition, mitigate risk, or improve overall performance. If L&D is in a position to provide evidence of a lever to the top table, leaders will be compelled to use it. And so, the consensus view seems to be that L&D needs to improve and safeguard its position within the organization by using data analytics. But in order to do that it has to be proactive on data in a way that, so far as the majority of organizations are concerned, nobody in the business is asking for or expecting. L&D has to overcome the risks that this move might bring, of exposing its own knowledge gaps, or of uncovering bad results that nobody wants to hear about.
Article sponsored by:
