Hi ,

Welcome to the spring of 2025!

Here in Portugal we’re enjoying the wettest winter since I believe 1850….but the hills are lush with fresh greens and the smell of beautiful flowers is all around us!

Spring means not just that the weather improves (hopefully). For many of us it means ‘Spring Clean Up’: getting rid off all the winter clutter and give everything a good clean.

This newsletter is all about spring cleaning, but ‘Learning Analytics Made Easy’ style!

One of the thing I always notice when I work with learning teams and organizations is the huge volumes of excel files that are being created, shared, processed and used to provide many different L&D related insights to many different people.

In large organizations with large learning teams….there’s almost an industrial level of excel related activities.

Every single day.

And while excel has it uses (I use it everyday), it can be extremely inefficient and risky. Especially when using excel in large numbers for fairly simple and recurring reporting needs. Just the manual work alone can be staggering!

And especially when there is a much more efficient and effective solution available: the L&D dashboard!

So, this news letter explains why excel is not always the best solution, why it’s worth replacing your excels by a dashboard and how to approach this transition.

Happy cleaning!

Peter

Why so many excels?

“Can you get me a report on …?”

If you’re working as a learning consultant, or in a more administrative role in L&D, you will recognize this question: ”Can you get me a report on…?”

I also have seen Chief Learning Officers getting this question from Heads of HR or the CEO.

And what all of us do when receiving a question like this, is that we go to our LMS or LXP, run a report, download the report in excel and send it over by email, or put it on a SharePoint or google drive.

Excel is super easy to use, very flexible, fast and it’s freely available.

So on first thought, excel is a perfect solution to the question: ”Can you get me a report on…?”

But there is a dark side to using excel…

Why Excels do not always excel…

So while excel is a very powerful tool, loved by even the most hardcore data analyst. There are some serious disadvantages in using excel.

Lack of Consistency: Excel is too flexible. Anyone can make changes and many will make changes. This makes it very difficult to establish a single source of truth and increases the risk of reporting the same metric with different outcomes. Especially if you consider that many recipients of excel reports make their own data visualizations for presentation in PowerPoint….

Data Security & Privacy Risks: Excel causes data to be distributed to various channels and people in a uncontrolled way. Excels ending up in mailboxes, local and shared drives increase the risk of data security and privacy breaches that could costs the company serious money!

Quality: If everybody is ‘doing their thing’ in excel you have no way of knowing what people do and if data extractions, manipulations and calculations are done correctly. I’m not saying people are making mistakes, but there is no way of making sure they don’t!

Time, Effort and Costs: Creating, sharing and maintaining multiple excels, especially when they contain in essence the same data is very time consuming. Especially when you realize that it’s not just the sender of the excel spends valuable time over and over again, also the receiver who is using the excel to create data visuals to put in PowerPoint slides will have its hands full!

‘Locked up data’ hurts your AI:: When you realize that AI runs on data, and that the success of AI depends on the quality and quantity of data available, you can easily see that having all sorts of excel lying around, each of them potentially including valuable insights that are only available in that excel will not help your plans to deploy AI!

Performance: Excel is really helpful when you deal with a limited dataset. That is why we use excel for our data & analytics training. However, even for smaller organizations the number of training records can add up quickly to several tens of thousands. And that could dramatically slow down excel the minute you try real serious data manipulations!

Story: from excel to a global compliance learning dashboard

When I was supporting the global learning compliance team at an large international energy company, they had a serious challenge with reporting.

The issue: wrong numbers led to unnecessary escalations

Compliance learning is taken extremely serious in this company. So Compliance officers created their own reports based on extracting data from the LMS and then process that data in excel to create visuals they copied to PowerPoint.

Sounds familiar?

The immediate reason to address the challenge was an escalation by one of the compliance officers who decided to add up % of non-compliance leading to the report-out of a very high percentage non-compliance. I believe it as around 35% where only 2% was allowed. This lead to an immediate escalation to almost the executive committee as such a number would have been totally unacceptable.

Which was not the case as the real number was around 3,5%!

The deeper root causes triggering the replacement of manual excel reports by a single dashboard were the following:

1. No overall insights in progress across the entire workforce (~180.000 employees worldwide). Each compliance officer made their own numbers but nobody could bring it all together.

2. Establishing a single source of truth following global definitions and controlled calculations

3. Massively reduce effort and time spend on reporting so compliance managers could focus on other more valuable tasks

4. Massively reduce unnecessary escalations and noise due to misaligned numbers and human errors

When we deployed the dashboard, the change was not just a much more simple, streamlined and efficient process to get accurate compliance learning insights, but also a higher % of timely completions due to the increased availability of these accurate insights to all compliance officers!

An additional benefit from the dashboard was that L&D showed it’s worth and it’s ability to work more data driven. Something we did not plan for but was a very nice feature was the ability to optimize planning and start doing simple predictive analytics. Yes. you read that well….you can do simple predictive analytics using a dashboard!

Curious how such a dashboard could look like?

Below is an example of a learning compliance dashboard for you to have a look and play around with.

What excel reports to select for cleaning?

An easy to use checklist!

With so many excels going it around, not all might qualify to be replaced by a dashboard. So the question is, which excels? Here’s a few criteria that you can use

Frequency: Excel reports that are shared on a frequent basis indicate that people want to check data on a regular basis. These are excellent candidates for inclusion in a dashboard!

Slice and Dice: You might also be in situation where for example different people want the same information like completions, learning hours of compliance completion rates. But everybody wants a different slice of the data. One person wants to see the last 2 years, another one only 2024. Some would like to see the data for Finance, and another one for Sales. Some want the data for leadership development programs, another for all AI upskilling programs. This is where a true dashboards comes together through the use of filters and dimension selectors. When you are mostly dealing with only a small number of metrics but need them in many different slices and dices, a dashboard is the way to go!

Personal Data: Personal data is a tricky subject and potentially worth a whole newsletter edition! I’m a firm champion of protecting people’s personal data and have had my fair share of meetings with business leaders and heads of legal where I was required to defend my decision to NOT disclose personal data. If your company is taking data protection and privacy serious, the last you want is large numbers of excels going around that include personal data. Because each of them is a potential data privacy breach! Dashboard tools like Power BI have advanced functionalities to exactly define and configure who has access to what data. This allows you to keep all your learning data safe and secure as well as comply with all data privacy rules and regulations…

Key Stakeholders: An interesting criteria I always use is not linked to what data is or should be included, but for whom the data is intended. By putting a state of the art learning dashboard in place for your key stakeholders, you do not only make it easy for them to get the insights they need, but also demonstrate a true data driven L&D! A special group of stakeholders that I always feel would benefit a lot from a comprehensive learning dashboard would be the managers in your company!

How to go from excel to a dashboard?

Once you have selected the excel that you want to replace by a dashboard, the next big step is to go out and figure out how get a dashboard. Here’s some options

Use the dashboard functionality in your LMS/LXP

The obvious first option is to look to your LMS or LXP. They should come with at least some dashboard functionality. Most LMS and LXP systems that I know do. And it could get you started. Especially when for example targeting managers. Providing them with a easy to use dashboard will encourage them also to visit and revisit the tool more frequently.

The downsides? Well, LMS and LXP tools are made for learning, not dashboarding. So whatever functionality they have available will not hold up against what real Business Intelligence tools like Power BI can do!

Also, you almost never can integrate learning data with other data like finance, skills and business data. So if you want to take L&D impact seriously, the LMS/LXP dashboard will not help!

Use HR Analytics Tools

A next good option to consider is to look at your colleagues from HR. They might have an tool in place that is specialized in HR analytics like Visier or CruncHR. These tools are specialized in HR Dashboards and often also have basic L&D dashboards in scope. The nice thing about these tools is that they take care of the heavy lifting. You do not need to be a data scientist or learning analytics expert.

The downside of these tools is that they only offer the real basic L&D metrics. This does makes sense when you consider that these companies were founded specifically for HR analytics, not learning analytics. Also, they will not be able to incorporate a lot of business data into your dashboard if and when you are ready to analyze the impact of L&D on business performance.

Use Specialized L&D Dashboards

There are unfortunately only a few specialized providers of L&D dashboards. It shows that there is still a long way to go in Learning Analytics.

Some companies like Watershed and Yet Analytics have developed software solutions based on LRS data structures: learning record stores that use xAPI standards. xAPI and LRS standards are very useful as they allow you to collect much more data compared to traditional LMS platforms. Still, integrating business performance data with your LRS could provide a challenge as the business data might use completely different data structures

At SLT Consulting, we actually made a conscious decision to not develop our own software but use the best data and analytics software that you can find in the market like Alteryx and Power BI. This allows us to focus on what truly matters: actionable insights for L&D. It also allowed us to develop a data model that allows ‘easy’ integration with other sources: skills, finance and business data!

Develop your own L&D Dashboards

A final and brave option is to fully design, develop and build your own L&D Dashboard. This enables you to build one exactly to your needs! Just be mindful that it could be quite the mouthful to do so! Depending on your tools, your data and your needs, designing, developing and building your own L&D dashboard is a big undertaking!

A good thing then that you read my newsletter!

Tips for creating L&D Dashboards

While creating a dashboard could be fairly easy, creating a good dashboard is much much more complicated! The internet is full of examples of really poorly designed dashboard and incorrect or even misleading data visualizations. Here’s some examples I’ve shared earlier.

So here are my top tips to create that awesome dashboard that everybody wants to use!

1. Consider what actions people should take based on the data. People who know me recognize that I often talk about actionable insights. I’m no fan of showing data without triggering an action. Showing data should not be the objective of your dashboard. It should be triggering actions and supporting decision making!

2. Which brings me to the 2nd tip: always compare the data against something like a target, average or benchmark. Data without comparison leads to so-called vanity metrics. Nice to to look at, but they do not really mean anything. A thousand completions? Nice and well done. But what was your objective? Did you plan to have 5.000? Then it’s not so good, did you plan only a 100, no good either.

3. Avoid clutter and think user centric. A lot of dashboards are packed with charts, tables and trendlines. Space is precious, so you might have a tendency to put as much on your dashboard page as possible. It’s much better to focus on that which truly matters. Think carefully how your users will look at the dashboard. What are they really interested in? What signal should trigger a closer look? What dimensions are key?

4. Start small. My standard advise for building analytics skills, start small in an area that you are very familiar with, goes for building dashboards as well. Better to start small, get people to use it, collect feedback and expand/improve over time. Confronting L&D professionals with loads of insights in an action packed dashboard will not help them trying to figure out how to read the data and what to do with it. Starting small also helps you to ensure that the numbers in your dashboard are accurate!

5. Get leadership support. Getting L&D professionals to see the value of a dashboard could be a challenge. We’re simply really not used to having one around and consult it regularly. Getting support from your L&D leadership team could be a nice way to boost adoption: if leaders actively use the dashboard and share their positive experiences, others will follow!

6. Leverage colleagues and partners. Even with the most advanced technology, deploying an L&D dashboard is still a big undertaking. Don’t try to do this alone. Trust me, I tried once and was very glad to get help from someone who knew much more about data and databases than I did. Check with analytics colleagues in your organization, check with your tech providers and please do reach out if you’re curious to understand how we from SLT Consulting can help you. You are not on your own!

Thanks for joining me on this fascinating journey into L&D Data, Analytics and AI! Drop me a note if you have any specific questions or ideas for a next edition. Or want to have a more in debt conversation on analytics

Best,

Peter Meerman