The two most important questions to ask yourself when planning for the future of your L&D program is “How am I doing now?” and “How do I want to be doing in the future?”. The first step is to perform a thorough audit. A comprehensive L&D audit is an important step in developing a long-term strategy for your organization. Conducting the audit will help identify training needs that are not being met, or may be missing completely. It will also give you insights into which performance goals need to be developed and how best to meet them.
Companies who take their employees’ development seriously understand the importance of conducting regular audits. A thorough review can reveal gaps in learning resources, opportunities where current programs could be improved, and potential areas where new programs should be added.
Why Are L&D Audits Essential for Business Growth?
Learning and development data enables you to identify patterns and trends that have a broader impact on personnel. For example, you may come across old resources or courses that are no longer relevant to your team. Last but not least, L&D audits allow you to examine corporate objectives through the prism of employee development. Are your objectives still relevant and quantifiable? Can staff fulfil the goals with the resources at their disposal?
What are the critical components that should be audited?
- L&D strategy: A important component of the audit is the organization’s L&D strategy, which must focus on several aspects of developing a learning and knowledge strategy inside the organization, as well as the impact the plan has on learners and businesses: Learning Needs Analysis, Training Needs Analysis, and Impact of L&D
- Technology stack: Sometimes technological innovation may result in non-integrated, disparate tools and technologies that obstruct rather than help effective training and development operations.
- L&D goals versus results: What were the metrics of success established and how did the programs perform against them?
- Budget: An L&D review can assist demonstrate the business case for continuing to engage in training programs in the face of training budget reduction. Two essential components of any L&D budget audit are: ROI determination, and Planned vs actuals
- Learning offerings: L&D auditors must examine the organization’s overall learning offering from beginning to finish.
Audit Techniques:
- Analytics and Reports – Reviewing the actual performance against set KPIs gives a deeper insight of the success and impact of the L&D initiatives
- Interviews: Interviews can be organized (planned questions) or unstructured (exploratory, flexible style), and they can be done online or in person. Used for qualitative feedback
- Surveys: These are perfect for gathering feedback from a big, geographically dispersed group. They’re also an excellent way to follow up on each L&D program.
- Obtaining guided inputs/feedback from a small number of participants is a useful technique to perform a targeted assessment/audit of critical L&D efforts.
How can the audit be turned into actionable steps?
Conducting a training and development audit is worthless unless the results/findings are translated into actionable steps by management. A two-step procedure is required to make a training and development audit actionable:
- Assess and Identify
- Current State: The first stage is to identify particular issue areas within training and development efforts that need to be improved, modified, or completely overhauled.
- Future State: Use the audit results to establish comprehensive action plans for expanding organizational training and development capability in certain areas.
- Prioritize and Align
- The next step is to priorities low-effort, high-impact initiatives that will provide you the highest return on your L&D expenditure. Auditors must ensure that all actions are in line with the organization’s goals and objectives while prioritizing them.
Conclusion:
A training and development audit is a crucial tool in the toolbox of business executives looking to accelerate organizational change. These audits enable firms not only compare themselves to industry L&D benchmarks, but also identify areas for learning and development enhancement and solve learning and performance gaps through training.
Hope the techniques and strategies in this area give you the information you need to properly audit your training and development projects.
