The L&D Audit

How to Ensure
Your Learning Organization is
Ready for Change
 Table of Contents
3 Getting Started With Your L&D Audit

4 L&D Strategy Audit

7 Learning Audiences & Learner Personas

11 Stakeholder Relations

13 Assessing L&D Team Capacity & Resources

18 Learning Operations Audit

22 Data and Analytics

24 Benchmarking Your Digital Maturity

27 Conclusion
Introduction

Change isn’t just on the horizon. It’s already here and has been massively accelerated by events such as the
Covid pandemic. Things like skills obsolescence and digital transformation have been an ongoing concern for
organizations worldwide for some time, but are now reaching critical levels of urgency for businesses who
want to remain competitive.

But responding effectively to such fundamental shifts takes careful planning and a concerted effort to align the
entire organization behind new strategies and goals.

In the midst of all this, L&D leaders find themselves in a position that presents challenge and opportunity in
equal parts. Training programs and learning strategies will undoubtedly play a decisive role in how successfully
your organization manages this ongoing change. L&D departments will have the opportunity to influence
organizational performance like never before. With that opportunity comes the challenge of making sure your
department is fully equipped to rise to the occasion.

That’s where a top to bottom audit of your learning organization comes into play. Establishing the current state
of your department across all dimensions ensures you’re better able to respond to organizational demand,
operate as efficiently as possible, and align with the needs and priorities of stakeholders.

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Getting Started With Your L&D Audit

A full audit of your L&D department can be as high level or as granular as you need it to be. However, the more in-depth you can
go, the more accurate and complete your current state analysis will be. This will lead to a much more robust decision making
process when it comes to potential change implementation as a result of your audit.

But focusing on change, not just within the L&D department but in the context of the wider organization and market forces,
means addressing some key areas during your audit, including:

Learning
Stakeholder
L&D Strategy Audiences &
Relations
Personas

Team
Learning Data & Digital
Capacity &
Operations Analytics Maturity
Resources

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L&D Strategy Audit

More than simply launching initiatives and jumpstarting new processes, a robust strategy must underpin all decisions. Without
the big picture, short-term initiatives can fail to make an impact.

Starting your audit with your L&D strategy is the best way to ensure the rest of your audit is focused on organizational objectives
and performance. Your strategic audit will help you analyze past performance to identify where your current strategy is falling
short.

An L&D strategy should clearly outline:

The mission of the learning organization

What do we do?
How do we do it?
Who do we do it for?
What value do we bring?
L&D departmental objectives
Planned initiatives to meet the objectives
KPIs to measure the success of those initiatives
The timelines and milestones of each initiative

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 If you don’t currently have a formalized L&D strategy, start with the outline above. To make sure your
L&D strategy and objectives are realistic achievements rather than just words on a page, create each
objective and initiative with SMART goals in mind. This means each objective and initiative should be:

Specific
Vague objectives won’t get you very far. So, ensure your goals are written with specific parameters in mind. Think about:

What you want to accomplish

Why the goal is important
Who will be involved
Where it will happen
Which resources will be needed

Measurable
Do you have a specific end goal that will let you know when the goal has been achieved? If you don’t, your initiatives will quickly
lose direction. Think about:

Practical outcomes
Specific performance metrics
How you will know when the goal has been achieved

Actionable
Is a complete training program overhaul a realistic goal for you in 2021? If it’s not, then don’t set yourself up for failure. Be ambitious
with your objectives but balance that ambition with a realistic perspective on what you, your team, and your organization can
achieve in L&D within the next year. Think about:

Will you be able to get all the resources you need?

Are there any constraints that make achieving the objective practically impossible?

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Relevant
Maybe there’s been talk about implementing mobile learning. But is that something your learners want or need? Will it help bring
the organization closer to its overall aims and objectives? Think about:

Whether the goal is worthwhile

If the timing is right or not
Does it still apply to any new circumstances or objectives within the organization?

Timebound
Although you’re creating objectives to be achieved within a relatively long time frame, each objective and initiative will have its own
time requirements. You also can’t do everything at once, so it’s important to define milestones and deadlines for each initiative. That
way, you can track progress throughout the year. Think about:

Is this objective too big for one year?

What can I realistically achieve?
What can be done next week or in six months?

Evaluating your learning strategy is something that should be done both at the
beginning and end of your overall audit. You will likely find that an analysis of
different areas of your training department will have a significant impact on the
goals and objectives of your L&D strategy and help you to refine it even further.

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Learning Audiences & Learner Personas

Learner personas enable your training team to keep the learner at the centre of all decisions around training, from analysis to
design and delivery. But learner personas can change over time. So a regular audit and reassessment of your learner personas
ensures you are staying current and relevant in terms of your learners’ needs and expectations.

What is a Learner Persona?

The concept of a persona to represent a target audience was first developed by product and marketing teams. They are used as a
way to guide decisions when materials are designed and produced. Personas allow your team to ensure whatever they produce is
created with an empathetic approach towards the end user.

The result of using personas are experiences and products that provide maximum value to the end user by taking their
demographics, preferences, and expectations into account during the analysis and design phase.

Learner personas are profiles of make believe people who represent the traits and preferences of different segments of your
learning audiences. A learner persona might include:

Name, age, seniority, and previous experience

Learning preferences
Common challenges
Hard skills acquired
Soft skills aptitude
Career aspirations

When designing a learning experience for a specific group of learners within your
organization, you and your team can use these personas to design training that maximizes
engagement and provides true value to the learner.

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 Why Audit Your Learner Personas?
Even if you already have learner personas, it’s important to assess their relevance and accuracy regularly. The preferences and
demographics of the workforce change over time. A learner persona created ten years ago may no longer apply.

For example, Millennials and Gen Z are rapidly moving into the workforce as older generations move out. The expectations,
career aspirations, and learning preferences of these employees has been shown to be vastly different to previous generations.
They’re also generally more digitally fluent.

Other factors that may impact your learner personas are mergers and acquisitions, shifts in corporate culture, and external
market forces.

Regularly auditing your learner personas ensures the learning experiences designed by your team resonate with learners, address
their needs, and cater to their preferences for maximum value added.

Auditing Existing Learner Personas

1. Assess company wide changes

Major shifts in the organization can have a significant impact on the demographics and preferences of your learners. For example, if
your company has merged, you may have an entirely new group of employees and learners to take into account. Perhaps your
business is expanding into an entirely new market, or leadership has changed and major cultural changes are underway.

The pandemic is a prime example of the type of change that could impact the validity of your existing learner personas. There have
been budget freezes, cuts to headcount and an entirely new way of working for many people throughout the shift to remote work.

These types of changes should be taken into consideration at the beginning of your learner persona audit so you can align them
with business needs as well as learner preferences.

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2. Structure your learner persona
Before you go any further, structure a blank learner persona. This will let you know what type of information you need to collect
to create robust and genuinely useful learner personas.

What gaps exist in your current learner personas? Are there any demographics or elements that you could collect that would
enable your training team to develop more valuable learning experiences? Once you have the learner persona fully structured,
you can begin gathering what you need.

3. Conduct a survey
Many organizations already conduct learner surveys regularly to assess demand and preferences. When conducting an employee
survey related to training, ensure you include questions that can help you segment your learning audience and accurately fill in
the blanks in your existing personas. Your survey should capture:

General demographics
Position and tenure with the company
Role and responsibilities
Attitude towards training
Current time spent on training
Existing skills profile
Career goals
Learning goals
Learning delivery preferences
Digital fluency
Defining traits
Current challenges in their role
Training courses completed to date

Some information may be difficult to gather through surveys. In that instance, it can be beneficial to leverage HR and team
performance data to round out your learner personas.

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4. Assess past performance
Surveys can be useful, but they also have their limitations. People are prone to saying one thing in a survey but failing to follow
through. This has been shown many times over when market research fails to accurately predict what customers actually want
once a product or service is in front of them.

So, while survey data can be a primary source of information for your learner personas, it’s also important to look at the hard and
fast results of training.

If you’ve been gathering feedback from training sessions regularly, it’s just a case of analyzing the performance of different types
and topics of training. Similarly, eLearning platforms or your LMS can make it easy to analyze adoption and engagement rates
with previous training.

By assessing the past performance of training against your survey results, you can build a more accurate picture of respondents
true preferences and need for different types of training.

5. Identify trends
Once your data is gathered, you can begin to identify trends and segments within your overall learning audience.

Significant groups within your learning audience can then be segmented and a learner persona created (or an existing one
amended) to reflect the demographics, preferences, and behaviours of that group.

6. Incorporate the changes

Now that the trends are identified, you can begin to incorporate them into your learner personas.

Learner personas should read as if the person is real, even though they are a fictional representation of a large group of people.
Writing them this way provides your instructional designers and training team members with a person, rather than a bland list of
demographics. Designing for a person rather than a statistic is what ensures an empathetic and learner-focused approach to
learning design.

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Stakeholder Relations

When it comes to delivering value, your learners are only half the equation. Aligning with corporate strategy to produce
performance-driving results for your organization takes close collaboration and consultation with critical business partners and
stakeholders.

But, when working with internal customers, it’s not all about taking direction and delivering on each and every request that
passes through your inbox. L&D needs to move towards partnering with internal stakeholders to deliver training that is needed,
not just training that is requested.

Auditing or assessing the way you currently work with stakeholders provides an opportunity to act as learning consultants rather
than training producers, which means better training results for your team, stakeholders, and learners.

This may be a more fluid process than the rest of your audit. It’s difficult to quantify stakeholder relations and it’s even more
difficult to change perceptions and relationships that are well established.

"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress,

and working together is success."
- Henry Ford

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To assess how productive your stakeholder Once you have a better understanding of how
collaboration currently is, consider the your training team works with stakeholders,
following: there are several steps you can take next,
including:

Does your training team work more closely Establishing a Learning Advisory Committee
or efficiently with some departments more to better engage with key stakeholders and
than others? Why is that? business units

How long does it take to move from initial Find ways to get stakeholder more involved
training request to project kick off and with the training development process
project completion?
Identify gaps in training project management
Do misunderstandings about deliverables processes that are causing misconceptions
and timeframes frequently crop up? Is scope and unrealistic expectations
creep an ongoing challenge for your training
team?

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Assessing L&D Team Capacity & Resources

In a recent update to an ongoing ATD study on the time it takes to create training, the researchers added some survey questions
to the study. They asked respondents to name the top barriers to faster production of training.

An overwhelming 67% of respondents named limited resources (including time, budget, or L&D team headcount) as the biggest
barrier to producing training faster.

It makes sense. No matter how advanced your learning tech stack or how hard you work, team capacity is a finite resource. There
are only so many hours in a day and there are only so many people on your training team.

An L&D audit is the perfect time to quantify your team’s capacity as precisely as possible so you’re better placed to make
strategic decisions and to assign projects and tasks for maximum efficiency.

"When we fail to grasp the systemic source of problems, we are left to

'push on' symptoms rather than eliminate underlying causes.".

- Peter Senge

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 What is Capacity?

When it comes to learning and development, capacity refers to your team’s ability to
meet their proposed workload. Capacity can be broken down into different metrics
depending on which is most applicable to the way your team works.

For example, you could calculate capacity in relation to the number of projects that can
be completed in a specific time period. Or you could calculate it based on hours of
proposed work and hours of availability.

More specific parameters (such as hours) will give you a more accurate estimate of
your team’s true capacity, especially as it allows you to take more variables into
account. Higher level parameters such as number of projects can be easier to calculate
based on past performance.

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Why Calculate Your Team's Capacity?

Calculating the capacity of your L&D team benefits your entire learning organization.

Capacity Vs. Demand Committing to Training Strategic Decision

Projects and Scheduling Making
When you have concrete data Deadlines
backing you up, it becomes Knowing your team’s true
much easier to rationalize your
When the time comes to capacity enables managers to
response to training requests
schedule a project, your team make strategic decisions
and the prioritization of about budgets, hiring extra
capacity calculations will
specific projects over others. resources, or onboarding new
enable you to make an
informed decision on when technology to lighten the
When a request lands in the
the project can be scheduled load.
team inbox, you’ll know
to begin and end. You’ll be
immediately whether this is
able to assess the demand Strategic decision making is
something your team is
each project will place on better decision making, and it
capable of taking on
your resources and decide ensures you're able to make
immediately, or if it will have to the most of your resources.
which can run concurrently
wait.
and which should be
scheduled for a later date.

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 How to Calculate Team Capacity

Calculating your team’s capacity can get complicated, but it’s an exercise well worth completing and it can be done to varying
degrees of complexity.

The core elements you need to capture and measure when assessing capacity are:

Team availability (by hours) The availability of specific skill sets

When calculating the amount of hours of availability of at the team level
your team, you can include full time, part time, contract, Your training team is likely to consist of a diverse set of
and freelance staff. You can also take annual leave and experience and skills. Different projects will require
time off into account to get a full and accurate picture of different skill sets. As part of your capacity assessment,
how many hours your team can dedicate to their you can calculate the availability of specific skills within
workload in a given time period. your department by hours. This can include design
expertise, skills with particular sets of technology such
as authoring tools, etc.

Experience and speed

Depending on the experience level of an individual team
member, some will work much faster at different tasks
than others. Incorporating the speed and proficiency of
individual team members in relation to different tasks
provides a more accurate picture of your team’s capacity
for fulfilling project requirements.

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Assessing Your Team's Capacity

Many L&D teams struggle to keep up with the demand for training. Prioritizing projects and managing stakeholder expectations
is a common challenge. So it probably won’t come as a surprise if your calculations show that your training team is stretched to
capacity or working well over it to keep up with demand.

Once you’ve got some hard and fast capacity numbers to work with, you can leverage that data to audit for operational efficiency
and strategic decision making, such as:

Budget increases or reallocation

Increasing headcount in specific areas or skills
Onboarding new technology to free up team capacity

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Learning Operations Audit

Prior to the events of 2020, the outlook for L&D was looking extremely promising. Budgets were going up, L&D teams felt they
were getting a seat at the table, and the reputation of learning programs was starting to move from cost-center to performance
driver.

But few could have predicted just how rapidly things could shift in the space of a few months. While the global pandemic
provided a unique opportunity for L&D to cement their position as an essential value-add to the organization, many also reported
budget freezes and cuts to headcount.

In the short term, that means even the most mature L&D teams will have to do more with less. In the long term, preparation for a
faster pace of business and better alignment with organizational needs is a must if L&D are to continue proving their worth to the
business.

Both of these objectives require training teams to have a firm grasp on operational efficiency. Auditing the efficiency and
effectiveness of internal L&D operations enables you to increase the quantity and quality of your output by working with what
you have.

"The most dangerous kind of waste

is the waste we don't recognize."
- Shigeo Shingo

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L&D Operational Efficiency Components

When it comes to operational efficiency, there are three core areas that must be audited for an accurate current state analysis:

Your L&D strategy

All processes related to training development
Your existing learning technology stack

But what exactly are you auditing for? Within the three areas, you’re trying to get an accurate reading on your operations across
three main criteria:

Effectiveness
Part of your audit will include analyzing whether your operations are having the impact they should.
What are your objectives and goals? Are you currently meeting them? What metrics are you using to
track the performance of your team’s operations and the output itself?

Efficiency
The speed and efficiency of your operations should be closely analyzed too. The idea is to maximize
output and minimize waste. For example, what elements of your learning stack are actually slowing
you down rather than speeding you up? Are you extracting all the value possible from each tool?
What are the bottlenecks in your processes that are unnecessarily tying up resources?

Alignment
Finally, are your operations built for alignment? That encompasses alignment with the organization,
stakeholders, subject matter experts, learners, and the different components of your training team.

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How to Conduct an Operational Audit of L&D

Think about your current processes and workflows. Were they carefully thought out? Or have they developed in an ad-hoc
manner over time?

Most business processes develop over a long period of time. Changes and improvements often come from individuals seeking to
do their own jobs more efficiently. They want more time back during the day because they are overloaded or because they spot
room for improvement.

Adaptations to processes mostly occur as a response to change. The events of 2020 are a perfect example of this. Working from
home has been on the cards for years, but few businesses ever considered it until they had to, despite the fact that statistics
show most employees are actually more productive in a work-from-home environment.

But when processes are adapted quickly as a response to necessity, they’re often not as efficient as they could be. Auditing the
efficiency of your current processes allows you to take a proactive approach to working the best way your team possibly can.

During a process audit, it’s important to get as many employees on the training team involved as possible. Since they are the ones
actually working through these processes on a day-to-day basis, they are best placed to provide feedback on whether a proposed
change is possible or optimal.

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An audit of your processes should:

Enable you to pinpoint waste of resources (including time)

Identify cost saving opportunities
Identify opportunities to maximize your team’s output

During your audit process, some important questions or areas of concern include:

Why do we do it this way?

Did we always do it this way? If not, why were changes made?
Who does this process impact? What is their feedback?
Is there documentation outlining the correct steps to take?
Does the team always follow the correct procedure? If not, are some steps unnecessary?
How much time does this process generally take from beginning to end?
Can any of this be automated?
Are any steps being duplicated across different team members or departments?

Again, it’s important to step outside learning design and widen the scope of the processes you are auditing. Many processes
that slow down training teams occur long before and after a course is designed and deployed. For example, consider the
following processes:

Training intake
Collaboration with business partners, stakeholders, and SMEs
Knowledge capture
Project planning and management
Resource allocation
Storage, cataloguing, and updating of learning content

Once you have identified a full list of processes that directly impact your training team, you’ll quickly begin to see areas for
improvement including automation and other time saving techniques.

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Data and Analytics

Learning and development teams spend many hours developing training courses for employees. But without a sufficient
feedback loop, questions are raised: is this training effective? Do employees find it useful? Are we properly supporting
organizational goals and improving performance? Without properly set up training analytics, it can be anyone’s guess as to
whether the carefully curated training program is effective.

Not only that, but there are lots of metrics not directly related to learning experiences or learner performance that can tell you
everything you need to know about how effectively and efficiently your training team is operating.

1.Training Intake
Gathering and interpreting training intake data helps L&D to close skills gaps, understand the needs and demand for training in
the organization, and better analyze existing resources. By understanding some of the data you can gather right from the training
request phase, you can make better informed decisions about how to prioritize requests and understand the training needs
amongst employees and management.

Some examples of training intake metrics to start measuring include the:

Volume of training requests your L&D department receives

Acceptance/rejection rate of training requests
Department and topic of each request

Consequently, trends will emerge that can help you align new course design to training demand and organizational performance.

The first step to tracking training intake metrics is creating standardized training request forms. Then, you can consistently collect
data on the metrics you want to track.

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2. Operational metrics
Why bother collecting and analyzing data on your training projects? One of the key benefits is resource allocation. By
understanding how long it takes for your team to complete specific tasks and types of projects, your future planning and
resource allocation becomes more streamlined and effective.

Some training project metrics to aggregate and analyze include:

Average time it takes to complete projects

Time spent on individual project phases such as intake, development, testing, etc.
Average project costs and budget required

The key is to find project management tools that will easily allow you to extract and analyze these kinds of metrics.

3. Learning Performance Metrics

All this is not to say that learning metrics are unimportant. They are, and will always be, a critical indicator as to the impact and
success of your training program. But learning performance metrics can go well beyond learner engagement rates. Auditing the
learning metrics you track involves:

Assessing the metrics you currently track: Are they vanity metrics?
Or do they really tell you something important about the success Data, Analytics, and Technology
of your training program?
While you can track and measure KPIs in a spreadsheet,
Aligning your analytics with the objectives outlined in your it’s time consuming work to maintain and requires a
learning strategy: Do you have KPIs in place to track your progress higher level of expertise to extract analytical insight from
towards strategic objectives? raw data.

Leveraging organizational performance data: What can business As you’ll see in the next section, technology has a critical
performance tell you about the success of your learning initiatives? role to play in how you track and analyze metrics across
Can you find better ways to tie new training programs to bottom your learning experiences and operations.
line business outcomes?

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Benchmarking Your Digital Maturity

There are many definitions of digital maturity. The most widely accepted and condensed is the notion that digital maturity
indicates your team’s ability to create and deliver value through digital means.

Digital transformation is sometimes used interchangeably with the term digital maturity. But a more accurate interpretation
would be that digital transformation is the process through which digital maturity is achieved.

It’s also worth noting that digital maturity is not a fixed state that you can eventually achieve and be done with. Many
technologies that were revolutionary 10 years ago are already obsolete. As technology continues to evolve, so will the definition
of digital maturity.

Traditionally in L&D, the creation of value has been viewed through the lens of digital learning experiences. Most recently, it has
included the use of cutting edge technologies such as Virtual Reality and AI in the design and delivery of learning materials.

"Going digital is more like a journey than a destination.

Predicting and preparing the next level of digitalization
is an iterative learning and doing continuum."
- Pearl Zhu

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But “value” encompasses a huge range of possibilities within L&D.
Value can be delivered through the digital transformation of many
processes and outputs, including:

Training intake
Team collaboration
Project management
Capacity planning
Resource management
Learning design
Learning delivery
Processes and workflows
Documentation
Insights and analytics

The value delivered through the digitization

of these processes includes:

Faster implementation of more impactful training initiatives

Better understanding and collaboration between team members and
stakeholders
Faster knowledge capture from SMEs
More efficient use of resources including time and budget
Increased team capacity by eliminating manual tasks

Using these criteria and parameters can help you to audit and assess the current
digital maturity of your L&D team and point you towards areas of improvement.

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Evaluate Your Existing Tech Stack
Digital maturity is not possible without the right technology at your side. For
example, perhaps you use email to send documents back and forth between team
members. Is this digital? Technically, yes. But is it the most mature type of
technology to leverage for things like collaboration and version control? Absolutely
not.

That being said, digital maturity does not necessarily mean using the latest or most
67% of L&D and talent
cutting edge technology. But it is about finding the most efficient and effective way
to work via digital channels. So, when you’re evaluating your current tech stack, professionals say
benchmarking your digital maturity can encompass questions such as: limited resources
(including time,
Are we using multiple tools when one will suffice?
Do our different technologies speak to each other and integrate well? budget, or L&D team
What processes are still manual that could easily be digitized? headcount) as the
Is the training team leveraging each piece of technology to its full potential? biggest barrier to
Are the tools we’re using purpose built for our needs?
producing training
Lastly, it’s time to combine your operational audit and your technology audit. For faster.
example, maybe you have a clumsy process that takes place across email, multiple
documents, spreadsheets and storage locations. (Study by ATD)

Conducting some research as a result of your learning tech audit may show you
that there is a piece of technology out there that can consolidate many processes
into one place. If that’s the case, the time and cost savings of replacing a disparate
set of tools could make some room in your budget for a new, more efficient
addition.

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Conclusion

A full L&D audit takes time to plan and structure. It is a time consuming task and one that should be given the focus and
attention it requires. Performing an audit in this way ensures you can actually take some actionable insights from it so you can
improve your operations and outcomes.

Once your audit is completed, you'll be able to make more informed strategic decisions about how your team operates, the type
of learning initiatives you should focus on, how to track your success, and which learning technology you should adopt to help
you get there.

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