Towards Maturity Benchmark Study
Feedback from your learners plays an important role in improving your own learning and development process, but being able to compare your experience with other organisations can be even more valuable when making strategic decisions.
Towards Maturity has been collecting benchmark data on learning innovation for 12 years. The annual study is unique within the sector and offers participants more than just a chance to review how their L&D department is performing.
A personalised benchmark report is provided for anyone taking the hour or so of time to fill out the confidential on-line survey, and there’s a curated pack of resources including case studies and practical tips from leading companies in previous years.
How can you benefit from benchmarking?
L&D professionals in all areas can benefit from taking part. Some of the key areas that the study helps you concentrate on are:
- Aligning learning to business need and delivering business outcomes
- Understanding the modern day learner as a customer
- Supporting workplace performance and collaboration
- Demonstrating value
- Harnessing technology to deliver results
The personalised report will include scores for twelve key performance indicators to help you take action to improve learning within your organisation.
What can we learn from the 2014 results?
We’ve pulled out three interesting stats from the 2014 report which will help you plan where you can improve your performance. The full results are available to download from Towards Maturity.
Compliance elearning can have a big impact on completion rates
- 70 % - The average completion rate for compliance training, with 59% of compliance training being e-enabled
We were initially surprised that the average completion rate wasn’t higher, given the fact that we’ve seen completion above 90% for some of the compliance elearning we’ve delivered. But when we dig deeper and look specifically at the top 25% of organisations, we see more evidence of the beneficial impact of elearning compliance training; the best performers in 2014 saw an overall completion rate of 77% with 64% of that e-enabled training.
So an increase in elearning compliance can lead to a bigger increase in completion rate. It’s one of the big strengths of an LMS based system, allowing accurate tracking and simple ways to remind learners that training should be completed.
With our award winning compliance training, we’ve worked hard to encourage engagement by incorporating gamified elements inside SCORM compliant modules that give the business access to comprehensive data on the learner’s progress.
Less than a third of participants are realising the benefits they seek
- 31% of L&D professionals are realising the benefits they seek, down from 51% in 2010
When reported on its own this average doesn’t look good, and that’s a good reason to take a deeper look into the breakdown of figures over the years to see what we can discover.
Looking at two key areas in which elearning is often used effectively, compliance and helping implement new processes or products, we see a healthier trend from 2011 onwards than you might expect from the headline.
One of the most valuable things you will gain from the survey is the personal benchmark report, using this as well as the raw figures will allow you to target areas within your business which could see a big improvement.
Learners struggle to find the resources they need
- 12% of participants have content curation strategies in place to help staff make sense of resources available to them
40% of staff are prevented from learning because they can’t find what they need according to the latest Learner voice report.
With so much content available for learners steering them in the right direction can be one of the biggest challenges facing an L&D department. Here’s a typical response from one of the participants:
"I would like a study plan, requiring time and support from my Line Manager. I'm not sure where to start; there's so much on our online learning portal, it's a bit overwhelming."
If you find your users asking where to get the training they need it might be a sign that you should consider a more tailor made approach, rather than relying on disparate external sources of information.
By focusing on learners needs and building bespoke training campaigns Sponge is able to provide self-contained modules which offer learners the resources they need in a variety of formats without having to leave the training itself.
How do I get involved?
You can be a part of the 2015 study by heading to the Towards Maturity 2015 Benchmark Study page and filling in the on-line questionnaire before July 31.