The return on investment (ROI) on corporate education programs does not always yield tangible or easily identifiable metrics, making it difficult to understand whether the training has value. Training takes time, curriculum design, budgeting, resource allocation, and inter-area cooperation. But the reason organizations continue to invest in training is because, while its impact is not easy to detail in a financial report, the intangible value makes training worthwhile and a strategy for the permanent adaptation that businesses require today.

Within the framework of the talk “Think and Innovate the hybrid era” that I had this week with Melina Masnatta, director of Learning and DEI at Globant and Eliana Bracciaforte, co-founder of Workana, organized by the University of San Andrés (Udesa), Melina He shared how they are building new metrics that help measure the impact of learning and how to promote the ability to “learn to learn”, so important among the skills necessary for the jobs of the future. Her proposal is to use the ROL (return of learning), which we can translate as “Return on learning”, at the center of the metrics to foster a culture of lifelong learning.

“To the classic metrics, such as number of hours and satisfaction, we created an index that is applicability, which is responsible for measuring how and how much that acquired knowledge is applied in daily tasks. This gives value to learning and demonstrates its direct impact on the business, in which the permanent evolution of technologies requires a reskilling permanent. Today, we are reaching a 4.47% applicability out of 5, which indicates a good design of the learning programs that the different profiles have.

ROL can be measured on a micro scale, tracking the progress of a specific training program for a particular goal. The micro approach may include assessments or tests to determine retention of newly learned knowledge. Measurement scores and weights can represent how the new skill affects application and outcome.

On a more macro level, a database is fed with years of historical microdata to support future decisions. The macro approach is critical for companies exploring major transitions, such as a digital transformation or need for reskilling by the introduction of new technologies. The applicability index allows us to filter each new initiative in order to clearly understand how applicable this new knowledge will be.