I was reading an article over the weekend about the use of data in helping understand your learning offer, its engagement, and effectiveness.

All good until I got to the part which which said that the point where people drop off is where they give up and need to be re-engaged. This feels wrong.

Our focus on collecting activity and ‘training’ data seems to force these conversations. If we can’t collect data about our activity it doesn’t seem to count. If people are ‘dropping off’ it’s got to be a problem with the content, channel, delivery, etc.

It’s likely to be more complex and nuanced than that.

I’d want to know the answer to questions like:

• Did people return?
• How many times did they return?
• Where did they go after they left?
• How was the performance of the people who completed the training compared to those who dropped off?

It’s impossible to assume the material hasn’t kept people engaged if you’re only looking at a single data point. Be brave in looking for data which shows you the whole picture and not just inputs in isolation.