Incorporating Performance-Based Goals into Your eLearning

We often discuss how important it is to be able to measure the success of your training efforts. This is one of the biggest pitfalls of many unsuccessful organization training models – a lack of measurable metrics that will determine what’s working and what isn’t.

Unfortunately, so many organizations hit a road block in their training efforts as a result of not having a clear understanding of how effective it is, and this also leaves them unable to determine their true return on investment.

Not only can a lack of measurable goals be detrimental for an organization, but also for individual employees in terms of their personal development and career growth – employees may be unable to see how training is impacting them and how it can help them in the future, which tends to lead to a lack of engagement in the learning at-hand.

Download free whitepaper – How You Can Assess The Effectiveness of Your Training- Kirkpatrick Model

Why Consider Performance-Based Learning

In our other recent post, we discussed how high-performing companies are often the ones who also have a big focus on learning and development, and much of that L&D is created with an eye toward strategic business goals.

This tends to be a recipe for success.

Why is that?

When you develop learning that’s centered on how well employees perform as a result, it lets you identify gaps or needs in your organization and then specifically and directly address them.

It’s also going to be a method that gives you the best possible return on your investment and ensures your employees are clear on what’s expected of them, so they can really focus their efforts during training.

How to Create Effective Performance-Based L&D

When you’re development your multimedia L&D content around performance-based goals, consider the following:

• Any performance-based training and development should begin with laying out of concise goals, and these goals need to be measurable. Before creating your eLearning you need to determine how these goals will be measured and assessed. For example, if you’re designing customer service training, perhaps you’ll assess customers based on the goals of the training. If you’re working to train employees on a specific skill to be used on the manufacturing floor, you may measure how their efficiency improves after training.
• For truly robust performance-based training, you also need to assess not only how results are impacted by the training, but before that can be done you also need to look at the current level of skills or knowledge your employees have. This is vital to measuring success- you have to have an accurate before picture to really see the impact of the after picture. Before you begin designing virtual learning content, assess employees with regard to your goals, and then design training based on where there are gaps and deficiencies. This will help not only company leaders, but also employees see where they have weaknesses and how they’re being addressed.
• One of the best design tactics for performance-based training is to incorporate scenarios. We talk a lot about scenarios, and they tend to be incredibly effective in training that’s specifically designed to address performance. Scenarios put employees in a real-life situation and allow them to learn in that context. Another good component is to include is some type of challenge – this can be part of the scenario, or included in the form of a case study. Essentially, when you’re including a challenge of some type in multimedia learning, you’re forcing employees to use their skills and knowledge to become a problem-solver which is how they’re ultimately going to improve their performance.
• Provide feedback. This is an element of performance-based training that’s going to best help employees understand not just if they went wrong, but how they went wrong and this will help guide their future decisions that will improve their performance. In-depth feedback is a really good way to speak to employees and let them make actual changes in their behavior.

Performance-based training is increasingly becoming seen as a targeted way to train employees and it’s also time and cost-efficient because it speaks to the distinct needs of the organization and its employees.