It is surprising that despite the fact that effective L&D and training programs have been shown to boost an organization’s bottom line and keep more engaged employees on the job longer, many organizations don’t always conduct audits of their L&D and training programs. Instead, they frequently conduct financial audits, compliance audits, environmental audits, and other internal audits.
To increase overall employee L&D effectiveness and maintain business profitability, it is a good idea to take a closer look at how well your training programs are working. This is where learning and development auditing comes in. Let’s go over how to audit a training program step by step in this article.
What Is An Audit Of Learning And Development?
Measuring the effectiveness of a company’s training program requires conducting a learning & development audit. In order to properly understand the training requirements for the benchmarks of achievement, productivity, and engagement, one must go through the audit process.
Why Should The Training Programs In Your Company Be Audited?
In fact, the pace of organizational transformation should keep up with internal change. L&D teams should therefore always collaborate, make adjustments, and take note of this change.
The best way to adjust your organization’s training program to the constantly shifting demands of productivity and performance. This process helps to:
- In comparison to industry L&D benchmarks, evaluate the company’s performance.
- evaluating the effectiveness of the current L&D strategies and suggesting areas for improvement.
- Make sure training programs are in line with the goals of your organization.
- Employee training can be used to highlight performance and learning gaps.
- The preferences of your learner should be identified and understood.
Important Components Of Performing L&d Audit
Learning And Development Strategy
The audit focuses on the company’s learning and development strategy as well as the different facets of developing an effective training environment while filling in knowledge gaps and omitted areas. The following elements of this strategy have an effect on both businesses and trainees.
- Training Needs Assessment
- Learning Needs Analysis
Training Needs Assessment (TNA)
Auditors must assess the processes and procedures for identifying learner needs and decide whether L&D strategies are in line with organizational training goals and performance.
Learning Needs Analysis (LNA)
A learning and development audit should now concentrate on looking at the business’s learning strategy. Auditors should gain more knowledge of the learning metrics used to track and assess employee performance in order to successfully implement the L&D analysis strategy of learning needs. They should be aware of how the business gathers and handles feedback and data related to learner analytics.
The Company’s L&d Process
As businesses change, so do the processes and procedures for learning and development. If not carefully planned, created, and implemented, L&D processes can turn into bottlenecks. The following are some of the areas where a process audit will focus:
- Documenting the procedure: It includes policies, guidelines, and best practices.
- Chances to save money: It covers both the rationale for keeping some procedures in place and the potential advantages of reviewing, improving, or getting rid of others.
- Possibilities to increase the amount of L&D produced: This could involve utilizing strategic partnerships, contracting internal processes, or outsourcing L&D processes in order to speed up throughput and turnaround times.
Scrutinize Your Learning Portfolio
The entire learning portfolio for the organization must be examined by L&D auditors. This includes:
- All readily available educational materials are accessible, and they are available from a variety of sources, including libraries and repositories.
- various techniques and choices, such as personalized up- and reskilling and re-certification options.
- platforms, tools, and technologies for delivering training, such as those created or delivered internally as well as solutions offered by outside vendors and partners.
The Stack Of Technology
To make sure the L&D process is well-equipped to facilitate efficient training and development, the audit should verify the following.
- Tools for collaborating and communicating
- Tools for developing, delivering, and designing training
- Platforms for analyzing and learning data
- Among the other technologies, there are LMS systems, project management software, and content management systems.
Budget
Faced with reductions in training budgets, an L&D assessment can aid in making the business case for continuing to fund training initiatives. Any audit of an L&D budget must include two key elements:
- Calculating the return on investment: demonstrating the monetary returns on training expenditures (costs). Using this cost-benefit analysis, it is justifiable to keep funding L&D even in the face of a financial crisis.
- Actuals vs. planned: Start focusing on comparing planned and actual budgetary expenditures with objectivity. It’s important to remember to conduct an honest audit of both overspending and underspending because both can negatively impact effectiveness and quality.
How Can You Audit Your Training Programs?
Catalog Your Training Programs
To conduct a thorough audit, you must first create a list of all the training courses you have created as well as a comprehensive catalog of all the courses your learners can access through your platforms and learning management systems. It will be easier to audit each training program to make sure it is current and effective if you have this master list or catalog.
Analyze Learner Data And Feedback
In order to determine which training programs your learners participate in the most and how well they perform in each of them, look at their data when conducting your audit. It might be necessary to modify a training program to better meet the needs or preferences of your learners if the majority of them struggle with it.
Find out more about the reasons why learners seem to gravitate toward one training program over others. When compared to other programs, can mobile apps be used to access this one? Is it more engaging?
You can determine which training programs are more successful with your learners using such learner data. You can also ask learners directly for their opinions and conduct polls to find out which training programs they like and why.
Evaluate Employee Performance
When performing your audit, you should also consider the employee performance data gathered prior to learners participating in training programs so that you can compare those data with the data gathered after they participate in training programs.
You want to ensure that a group of sales associates who took a sales training course afterward were able to sell more effectively, for instance. In other words, their sales performance ought to be higher than it was prior to taking the training course. The training program was ineffective in all other respects.
Assess Opportunities For Improvement
Look for areas where you can implement new technologies or strategies to improve your training programs as you audit them. Typically, you can find new opportunities using learner data, employee feedback, employee performance data, industry trends, and research.
For instance, you might find that your onboarding training programs require mobile apps or that your compliance training program can and should be conducted using virtual reality technology.
Above all, don’t be afraid to discard ineffective training programs or update them with newer technology to make them more effective.
Always Tie Training Programs To Organizational Goals
Make sure to link each training program to an organizational goal as you go through each one separately. Your programs won’t be successful or provide a high return on investment if they aren’t linked to an organizational objective.
Conduct an audit right away using the methods described above if you want your training programs to be successful and produce gains.
Conclusion
An audit of learning and development needs to be done in order to improve employee performance. It focuses on underdeveloped regions and skill or knowledge gaps. It is a useful tool for company representatives who want to boost employee performance, productivity, and engagement while accelerating organizational change.
When useful and effective training programs are created, employee performance and satisfaction increase. This can be done by utilizing extremely powerful auditing strategies that will take your L&D program to entirely new levels.