In this episode, we are joined by Tara Cohn. Tara is a Director at Wipfli, a Data Storyteller, and Analytics Translator! Together we discuss how to go from order takers to business partners, helping stakeholders & L&D identify and measure outcomes, and telling a better story with data that inspires the business to take action.

​Take Aways

• Understanding over efficiency.  Don't be afraid to ask questions and really understand the needs of a project request. Take the time to think through how to empower and support your colleagues. It may seem like a waste of time but this information can mean all the difference to the success of your project.
• Educate your peers. Don't expect your colleagues to know the intricacies of your process and how they relate to positive outcomes. Time spent educating your organization on what you do, the value you bring, and the what it takes to get there, will help you to build a brand at your organization.
• Speak in plain language.  Have discussions at the business level vs. technical level. Ask questions such as "what does good look like"? "What does it mean if something is failing"? "How would we know that"? Then move backwards from there to more technical needs. This gets us beyond looking only at metrics and understanding the process more thoroughly to find better solutions.
• Use industry standards and benchmarks to fill in any data blanks!
• Own your data! When selecting vendors, make sure you own and can access your data! 
• Build relationships. Get to know your peers and stakeholders! Relationships are the most important thing for L&D and BI Data & Analytics.
• Build your acumen. Learn how your organization functions. What does success for your company look like? How does that happen in every area of our organization? How can you align your efforts together to make that happen? Shadow team members, if you have the opportunity.

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Donors Choose

Do you consider the impact on capacity and efficiency of your organization when developing learning experiences? Whether you measure it or not, the decisions you make as a learning professional have a direct impact on the bottom line of your organization. Time spent learning, while worthwhile, impacts time spent selling, developing products, and supporting customers.

Here's a quick example
​Imagine that you have a 30 minute elearning course, that's all employees must complete every year, to protect against legal issues. If you have 1,000 employees in your organization that's 30,000 minutes (min) per year spent training for this course.

1,000 employees X 30 min = 30,000 min of productivity
30,000 min / 60 min per  hour = 500 hrs*
500 hrs / 8 hours per work day = 62.5 work days!
*Not including any time lost due to task switching.

In 3 years time, that's 187.5 work days spent on this course alone!

The cost of this time spent may pale in comparison with the cost of a multi-million dollar legal action. However, that doesn't mean your hands are tied. You can take action to improve efficiency of your learning experiences and return capacity to your employees.

Two options to impact the bottom line

1. What do employees really need to know? Ask stakeholders if employees need to complete the same course every year. Can they take a refresher instead? Cutting even 10 minutes off of the course saves 167 hrs per year. (20 min * 1,000 = 20,000 mins | 20,000 mins / 60 mins per hour = 333.3 hrs)
2. Make it adaptive! Can employees take a quiz or complete a simulation to bypass parts of the course or maybe all of it? A 10 minute quiz, with the requirement to complete refreshers on missed topics can also reduce the time spent without impacting outcomes.

Take action now!

1. Review your portfolio: Are there programs in your portfolio that can be improved, replaced, or removed? Take the time to determine if its worth the cost to re-design them or even replace them with a non-training solution. Per Kieran King, VP of Global Customer Insight at Skillsoft, "The failure of learning transfer costs companies millions of dollars a year in wasted expenditures and probably several times that in lost opportunities." 
2. Be courageous: The next time a stakeholder asks you to create a mandatory training, without a clear impact to the business, ask them if this project is important enough to use x amount of your organizations capacity. ( x employees * y time spent learning =  z capacity).

Trust me, when you ask someone if their project is worth 500 hours of Operations capacity, they'll think really hard about their answer.