Discussing your return on content investment with confidence

Investment in e-learning content doesn’t end at implementation; charting its return on investment (ROI) is crucial for continued success. It’s about measuring benefits like increased productivity, revenue, or customer satisfaction – costs associated with development, delivery, licensing, and maintenance to ensure effectiveness.

At Cornerstone, we recognize the importance of evidencing ROI on e-learning to support skills development and enable workforce agility. HR teams need to justify the investment to show value and secure future funding, measure impact, identify successes and areas of improvement, and benchmark against competitors and external standards. With this in mind, we’ve compiled some insights to help overcome ROI challenges and ensure your learning content is maximizing its value.

When we think of ROI on learning content, it’s easy to laser in on completion rates. But whilst they are important, they’re simply a starting point. The real impact is determined when you concentrate on measuring business outcomes.

By focusing on the bigger picture, you can evaluate whether learners are applying their newfound skills and knowledge to their role. That way, learning content directly contributes to achieving organizational objectives. Measuring business outcomes can also help to pinpoint where learning content has directly influenced revenue, customer satisfaction, or a reduction in other costs; similarly, it highlights where a program can be improved to ensure it continues to be effective and of high value. For instance, a newly commissioned study by Forrester Consulting revealed that the benefits of implementing Cornerstone include content consolidation savings worth $1.9 million over just three years.

ROI is important – but evidencing it isn’t always easy. One of the most frequent challenges we hear from customers is around day-to-day pressures, which are often aligned with some misalignment of stakeholders. Imagine compiling an impressive list of metrics from learner data and presenting it to leaders without context. Not only are they missing critical information to help their understanding, but they’re missing the link to its impact on the wider business.

For instance, it can be difficult to attribute business results to specific training, as outcomes are usually influenced by a variety of factors. Moreover, the benefits seen are usually qualitative; your workforce is more engaged, and morale has increased, but it can be challenging to quantify these. Finally, e-learning doesn’t always have an immediate impact, so you need to play the long game to see real benefits; for instance, recent Cornerstone research found that properly trained employees are 86% more likely to describe themselves as adaptable to change. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

To overcome ROI challenges, start by defining your objectives; keep them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Once you know the outcomes you’re aiming for, leverage both qualitative and quantitative metrics to paint a holistic picture of the content’s impact and emphasize that real results can take time to manage stakeholder expectations.

Qualitatively speaking, you can conduct surveys with employees to assess the content’s success or offer pre and post-training assessments to measure uptake in learner knowledge, skills, and engagement. Quantitively speaking, you can monitor KPIs, like sales or customer satisfaction. You can also leverage data analytics tools to identify correlations between e-learning and business outcomes and encourage data-driven decision-making.

Let’s look at an example. Our customer, a geohazard mitigation specialist, had no formal learning program before partnering with us. Activities were managed on spreadsheets, and it wanted a comprehensive solution to build the proficiencies of its mostly remote workforce. Now, it uses Cornerstone to manage everything – from training to compliance, to performance management – all in one place. By leveraging Cornerstone Content, our customers can visualize and report on when employees acquired skills aligned with their development plans. As a result, it achieved a 50% improvement in time to proficiency.

You’ve managed the challenges – what now? Maximizing ROI requires thoughtful planning and execution to align content to business goals and ensure that people receive the right learning at the right time.

Identify your KPIs and set measurable objectives to track the effectiveness of content. Then, communicate this to learners so they can understand how learning connects to both their roles and the business at large. That way, everyone – from the CEO to the new starter – is on the same page.

To get your workforce on board, personalize people’s learning experiences by taking individual needs into account, and offering adaptive learning technologies – like Cornerstone Content Studio – that adjust content and pace depending on their progress and evolving requirements. Learning should be fun and flexible, so consider incorporating interactive elements or gamification, and optimizing your content for mobile usage to encourage learning on the go. The format of content should be equally diverse; videos, quizzes, or immersive learning experiences keep the experience fresh and exciting.

Finally, to ensure your content is hitting the mark, track learner engagement and analyze performance data to understand what your learners are consuming, and what they’re struggling with. Supplement this with qualitative feedback to understand how your content investment is impacting their overall learning experience and skill development. That way, you can confidently measure, and maximize, ROI in both the short and long term.

Investing in learning content can have a transformative impact on your business. By taking the right steps to effectively chart its impact, you can unlock workforce agility, development, and growth.

If you want to learn more about our content offerings, get in touch here.