No executive in their right mind would argue with the fact that employee training is a basic business necessity. When organizations experience growth, change or competitive pressure, gaps emerge between what employees know and what they need to know in order for the company to remain relevant in the marketplace.
Good training bridges those gaps and impacts bottom line measurements like productivity gains, cost reductions and customer satisfaction levels as well as improvements in employee safety, morale and team building.
But here’s the rub: According to the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), U.S. businesses invest more than $125 billion per year in employee learning and development. That’s a lot of cash. Yet in today’s economic climate, employers and HR teams are being asked to do more with less – and for many executives, that means carefully calculating the costs, benefits and potential returns they will receive from learning technologies before they invest.
Now that smart phone sales outpace the sale of standard cellphones, the next wave of employee learning is sure to feature mobile technology, giving employers the ability to present anytime, anywhere training tools to their employees.
As an added bonus, mobile learning maximizes the return employers receive from training investments. But to nail down the ROI of mobile learning, employers need to pay closer attention to the connections between employee training and business outcomes.
Too often, ROI accounting focuses on efficiency rather than effectiveness. For learning investments, return isn’t just about counting dollars and cents – it’s about gauging the real outcomes learning technologies deliver to the organization.
Learning investments have no meaning unless they are connected to business goals and measured in terms of business metrics. Many employers evaluate training based on whether or not employees learned something new, retained the information or had, an enjoyable training experience instead of looking at how the training technology measurably impacted their business goals.
To increase the effectiveness of training and training technologies, businesses need to adjust their thinking and focus on the behavioral changes, business results and bottom line outcomes that were created by the training.
In the area of mobile learning, employers need to recognize the unique benefits mobile learning technology offers the organization and how mobile learning initiatives facilitate innovative, new approaches in employee training. This effect is noticeable due to the fact that the learning is delivered at the point of need, immediately helping the employee perform the task at hand.
There are a variety of ways in which mobile learning leads to ROI improvements and measurable results in organizations where employee training and business performance are inextricably linked.
It goes without saying that the value of any training expenditure hinges on whether or not the content is aligned with employees’ most pressing needs. But by taking the time to connect training investments to business outcomes, it’s easy to see how mobile learning delivers bigger bang for the bucks today’s employers spend on training technologies.