What are learning goals?

Learning goals or objectives are what we set out to accomplish when we create a learning program. There is a wide range of possible goals and objectives. Most learning goals are about the participants being able to retain new knowledge, or build new skills. But you can also think about more L&D process related goals that describe how well L&D is operating, like

  • Launching a program on a specific day
  • Have 5.000 unique visitors to the LXP per quarter
  • Gain a 100 registrations in the first week
  • Have a 1.000 employees complete before the end of the year
  • Have 75% completion rates
  • Reach 50% of employees in Europe
  • Have a 90% pass rate for the final knowledge check
  • Create a 500.000 euro revenue stream through internal billing
  • Get 1.500 learning hours per quarter
  • Reach 95% compliance rates
  • Achieve an 2x return on investment
  • Get a 4.2 rating out of a 5 point scale
  • Get 250 people pass the skill test by the end of the year
  • Reduce scrap learning by 40%

And many more.

Learning goals are the goals we set ourselves in L&D and that are fairly easy to measure and track through data and analytics. Most of the data you need sits in the systems that we use: our learning management systems, our learning experience platforms and our assessment or survey tools. Especially in combination with core HR data, this can provide powerful insights. You can have learning goals around participation (registrations, completions and learning hours), about engagement (discussions, views, logins etc), but also about learning transfer (test results, evaluations). You could even define learning goals on the level of your entire L&D organization by for example stating average levels of utilization of programs. This will allow you to identify and remove underutilized programs (assuming then that there is no demand for this).

The central idea of learning goals is that they specifically relate to one or more learning activities, and everything is set and measured within the scope of L&D. We control the process, and a such we will always be able to set goals and measure these ourselves.

What learning goals you set is up to you, your strategy and your priorities. It could well be that different programs have different levels of learning goals.

Unlock Learning goals from your documents

It’s great to see that more and more learning organizations have started to write down learning goals and objectives at the start of developing a learning program. The most common form of this is I believe a learning needs analysis document. Often a word document.

It is very essential that L&D defines their goals very early on. Because if you do not define your goals, how would you be able to track and to prove that you have delivered what you’re supposed to have delivered? Without learning goals you would simply not be able to demonstrate any success.

So my recommendation is to start documenting your goals and objectives basically as soon as possible; starting tomorrow is a really good idea. This could be goals related to a specific program, goals related to the adoption of learning technology platforms, or even goals for the entire L&D organization.

However, my concern is that these goals when they are defined and recorded, are locked up in documents: powerpoints and word based learning needs analysis documents. And that makes it very difficult to actually do any data analysis with these goals. Simply because there is no data about the goals.

So my second recommendation would be to always record your learning goals in such a way that you can connect them as data points to the rest of your learning data, that way you can bring your goals into your learning dashboard for example and easily compare how you are doing compared to your goals. Or you can do predictive analytics to understand if you’re going to reach your end of year goals, or that you need to do an intervention to make sure you do not fall short.

What are business goals

In education, business goals (if they exist and if you can really speak in terms of a business) are the same as the learning goals as learning is the primary objective of the organization. In all other organizations, learning is a means to an end. This means that learning is necessary to achieve something else. In essence you could consider all of that something else (i.e. goals outside learning) business goals. Like learning goals, business goals come in many shapes and sizes:

  • More sales
  • Higher customer retention
  • Higher spend per customer
  • Faster innovation
  • Lower overhead costs per employee
  • Lower turnover of critical roles
  • Lower supply chain costs
  • Lower costs on interest
  • Higher stockprice
  • Higher profit per employee

And this list goes on and on. While the list of potential business goals is very long, every organization typically has a set of 5 goals that they prioritize every year. And these can change over time.

And whereas learning goals talk about how well learning processes are run, the business goals really talk about how well the business is running. And how well strategic business goals are met.

What makes a good goal?

Now both business goals and learning goals are essential if you want to make a real impact through learning and development. Learning goals are essential to prove that you are running an efficient learning organization and that you are achieving your objectives.

Business goals are what it all is about in an organization and reflect how the organization is doing as a whole.

However, both business and learning goals will need to meet specific requirements if you want them to be useful. These requirements are best represented by the SMART principle: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely.

  • Specific: What will you achieve? What will you do?
  • Measurable: What data will you use to decide whether you’ve met the goal? Is this data available and is the quality sufficient?
  • Achievable: Are you sure you can do this? Do you have the right skills and resources, budgets and time?
  • Relevant: Does the goal align with those of your team or organization? How will the result matter?
  • Time-bound: What is the deadline for accomplishing the goal? And this deadline realistic?

So no matter if you are working on business goals or learning goals, please make sure that you formulate goals that meet the SMART criteria!

Why does the use of learning goals falls short?

Meermans First Law is a law developed by Peter Meerman and tells us that the more valuable the insight, the more difficult it is to measure:

When setting goals, it’s important to be aware of this rule. For example, if the goal of your learning program is to improve business performance, you will require much more data and much more complex analytics to determine a correlation between your learning activity and an improved business performance.

Whereas tracking program registrations and completions is actually much more simple. Or at least less complicated. That is the reason we in L&D are somewhat stuck in our focus on learning goals: it’s simply so much easier to do. And that is a pity because learning goals and metrics in most cases say very little about the actual impact of our learning programs. The only way to connect learning with business impact while not tracking any business goals is by making assumptions:

  • When somebody completed a learning activity, we assume that that person has learned something
  • When a person learned something we assume that they will apply it in their job
  • When a person applies it in their job, we assume it will improve personal performance
  • When a person improves their personal performance, we assume an improvement in business performance

And these are a lot of assumptions. Way too many if you ask me. Especially as these assumptions concern very fundamental aspects, and these assumptions are very hard to back up with evidence if you are not willing to do very solid analysis.

So only using learning goals, and assuming that these learning goals positively impact business goals is very risky. These assumptions could actually be valid. And I have no doubt that really good (and I mean really good) designed learning activities take you a long way.

But in a business environment where budgets are tight, pressures are high and people are very critical towards L&D, a focus only on learning goals will get you only so far if you can not prove that your assumptions are valid as well.

What if there are no SMART business goals?

Creating and tracking smart business goals is not always easy. Sure for some parts of the business it is: customer satisfaction can be measured through retention, or direct feedback. Sales is easily measured as are supply chain costs. But how do you measure innovation? How do you measure things like continuous improvement? How do you measure leadership success? In many cases L&D is dealing with customers who actually do not really have business goals defined, or where business goals are not SMART enough to be used and tracked. What to do then?

Well, I do not see it as a key role of L&D to help business define their SMART goals. That is a little bit out of our league I would say. A solution in cases where no real business goals, or no smart business goals are available is not easy. You sometimes might want to be firm and demand SMART business goals as a starting point for L&D investments, especially if a lot of money and capacity from L&D is needed. But you might not always have that luxury.

There might be ways to work this in a joined partnership between you and the business. This would mean start by making assumptions around business performance and the link to learning, clearly record these assumptions and jointly work to first of all start establishing more clear business goals, but also validating these assumptions over time to understand if they hold true. I would say this is an excellent opportunity for L&D to truly partner with the business and grow together.

Conclusion

It’s fundamental for L&D to have learning goals clearly established and recorded in a way that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Examples are launching a program on a specific day, reaching a specific number of people by a specific date, or having 90% of the target audience pass the skill test by a specific date. It’s also imperative that L&D takes all necessary steps to make sure there is data available to track actuals against these learning goals and see if and where L&D needs to intervene to reach the goal.

But L&D should not stop there. I hope that by now you realize this. L&D should move beyond learning goals to start looking more closely at business goals. And use data to analyze how learning contributes to business goals.

Learning versus Business Goals