Most L&D training launches go the same way. You start off full of optimism and hope that this initiative is the one that’ll make a difference and drive behavior change in your employees. But as the weeks go by, you soon realize that completion rates are below expectations and nothing has actually changed.
It doesn’t have to be this way. By implementing a structured framework that acts as a roadmap – with reviews in place after 30, 60, and 90 days – you can turn your training launch into a truly impactful initiative that moves the needle in your organization.
At VirtualSpeech, we’ve been helping L&D teams launch training programs that go beyond completion rates and achieve real adoption for over 10 years – and we’ve built this framework based on that real-world experience.
Why Your Training Isn’t Working
Frequently, L&D teams look to completion rates to measure the success of their training initiatives. And when those are below expectations, they panic and fall back on ineffective measures like making the training mandatory or setting tight deadlines for completion.
But these methods aren’t effective. When employees with busy schedules see this, they revert to viewing L&D as a checkbox exercise rather than something that actually benefits them in their day-to-day role.
What’s perhaps even more worrying is that when completion rates are good, L&D teams often use that stat alone to say the program worked. However, completion rates don’t measure:
- How engaged learners were with the material
- If learners found the material relevant to their roles
- Whether their behavior actually changed after the training
When L&D teams focus only on completion rates, they’re ignoring the bigger picture. And that feeds into subsequent training programs, making it harder to iterate on what worked and improve what didn’t.
The result? Training that doesn’t make an impact and that learners don’t engage with on a deep level. Changing this starts with building training that’s designed with adoption in mind right from the start, which we dive into in our in-depth guide here.
But building the training is only the first step. Launching training in a way that drives sustained adoption requires more than a quick LMS notification or a pinned message in Slack or Teams. It requires a 90-day framework.
Use our Training Audit Tool to discover your L&D team’s strengths and weaknesses — and where your most urgent areas of improvement lie — based on best practices founded on our work with hundreds of enterprise L&D teams worldwide.
90-Day Framework For Training Rollout
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to training deployment, but the best L&D teams approach it in a similar way. We’ve created this set of guidelines to help you benchmark yourself as you reach these key dates and milestones in your own training deployment.
If you’re on track – great. Keep working towards the next markers of success and make your training initiative the best it can be. If you’re falling behind? No problem – take some time to regroup, assess why, and set new targets to get you back on the road to success.
Day 1 to Day 30: Prepare and Polish
It goes without saying that the first 30 days are some of the most important when you’re rolling out a new training program to your target audience. This initial period can quickly become overwhelming if not managed correctly, so a structured approach is key, and there are a few areas that require the most attention.
Testing and Trialling
The theme of the first 30 days is fine-tuning. Start by testing and trialling your newly-minted training initiative with a small cohort of people.
If you don’t want to bring in your target audience just yet, ask managers or an assortment of different people in the organization to test for anything that might cause a poor or diminished learner experience.
Go into this testing phase with an open mind, with the knowledge that you’ll be collecting feedback in order to act on it quickly. This allows you to catch any technical bugs, quirks, or confusing layouts before you’ve rolled the training out to hundreds of learners.
Aligning Metrics
Unprepared L&D teams often find themselves months into a training initiative when they’re suddenly asked the dreaded question by their higher-ups: “Is it working?”. This usually leads to a scramble to pull data and run surveys with learners in order to have something tangible to bring to the table.
But this approach is backwards. The best L&D teams are thinking about metrics from the very first day the training initiative begins, if not before that.
Instead of making metrics an afterthought, align on metrics and measurement with your stakeholders before you deploy your training program (or within these first 30 days).
This means agreeing on what learner behaviors you are trying to change, what metrics you’ll use to determine behavior change, and importantly, what a successful initiative would look like based on these agreed data points – remember to go beyond completion rates here so you get a clearer picture when you review the numbers.
Preparation and Training the Trainers
When you’re rolling out a new training initiative, it’s likely that at least some of the people responsible for facilitating it won’t be familiar with the process. It’s essential that you adequately train the trainers inside the first 30 days, and ideally before your training program is deployed to a wide audience.
This helps facilitators get comfortable and familiar with the contents of the training program, which ensures that learners have a good experience. It also means facilitators have the knowledge to troubleshoot issues on the go – without derailing a training session.
There’s more to preparation than just that, however. Establish who is responsible for the overall training deployment, who the designated point of contact is should anyone have questions, and when other departments need to be brought in to assist, such as IT or HR for example.
Day 31 to Day 60: Refine and Reinforce
With the first month of deployment in your rear-view mirror, you should be looking ahead to day 60 and what you want your training initiative to look like by this next major milestone.
By this point, your training program should be rolled out to a significant portion of your target audience. With this comes pressure to make a great early impression – which makes this stage possibly the most critical of your deployment strategy.
Build Learner Excitement
The key to a successful training program is learner engagement. If learners are genuinely interested in what you’re offering, they’re more likely to take time out of their day to take part. The best way to generate this enthusiasm is by making it a key pillar of your training rollout.
Rather than sending an easily-missed email or LMS notification that alerts your audience to the fact that some new training is available, try something more attention-grabbing.
Perhaps you can run a live demo, run a gamified workshop, or tap into people’s natural competitiveness and create a leaderboard. In short – try to create champions among your target audience who will “sell” the training to their peers.
Tweak Where Necessary
Most of your program design and troubleshooting should have been completed by day 30. But inevitably, deploying training to a large, live audience will reveal issues that weren’t found during your testing phase. This isn’t an issue as long as your key training personnel are alert and ready to action any feedback that comes in over this period.
It also might just be as simple as making it more obvious as to where to access your newly-deployed training or adjusting timetables. Whatever might come up, ensure you’re prepared to implement a quick fix.
Check-in With Stakeholders
By day 60, you should also be starting to get a sense of how your stakeholders feel about this new training initiative. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a formal process, but ask around and try to understand whether it’s landing as intended.
Speak to facilitators – do they think the learners are enjoying the process? What’s the word on the ground? Ask some of the learners themselves, whether it’s by the water cooler or in a Slack or Teams message. You can even go up the ladder and report back on any early successes to your senior leadership team.
The goal at this point isn’t to get a detailed spreadsheet of feedback data – instead, it’s more about getting a sense of the mood surrounding your training initiative while you still have time to make tweaks and changes.
Day 61 to Day 90: Measure and Momentum
As you approach day 90, really start thinking about what your training program has accomplished so far and how to keep the positive momentum you’ve built going.
At the three-month mark, you should be starting to have enough performance data to understand whether your training initiative is working while also beginning to think ahead to future, successive deployments.
Hone in on Performance
Ideally you will have outlined what performance metrics your L&D team was going to track at the beginning of your training rollout, and by the three-month mark you should have enough data to map out early training results.
This isn’t the time to be selective or to try and fudge the numbers to make them look more impressive than they might actually be. Rather, it’s a time for honesty and reflection.
Leverage the conversations you had 90 days previously when aligning on metrics to help you paint a picture of the training program’s first three months. Why were those specific metrics selected? Why did you want to change those behaviors specifically? Then ask the million dollar question – did it work?
Assess Deployment Progress
If the performance data indicates that the training rollout has shown early signs of success, you should reflect on what went well and how you can replicate that in the future – whether that’s during the following months of this particular program, or in the initial phase of a future one.
Even if your training deployment did achieve its stated aims, there are likely still things to improve, so be open to constructive feedback from facilitators and students on what could make the program even better going forward.
On the other hand, if the results weren’t those you hoped to see, the need to evaluate what went right and wrong becomes even higher. Leverage your chosen metrics, surveys, and conversations with key stakeholders to help you understand what you need to change in order to make future iterations of this training deployment actually land with your target audience.
Not achieving your desired training results isn’t a disaster. Instead, with the right mentality, it can be a learning process.
Measuring Training Success
Waiting until the end of your rollout to figure out if your training is working is a backward approach. But even if you have aligned on metrics with your stakeholders from day one, what exactly should you be looking at to prove your program’s ROI?
The truth is that there’s no single metric that can definitively prove the success of a training program. Instead, you need to build a broader picture by combining evidence across three key areas
Engagement
Tracking attendance at a one-off workshop or looking at completion rates on an LMS only tells you a very small part of the story. True engagement is about that sustained momentum we’ve been talking about – whether learners actively interact with your training material over time.
Skill Development and Confidence
Once you know your learners are regularly engaging with the material, you need to determine if they are actually improving the skills you initially set out to target back at the beginning of your rollout. Tracking performance trends over multiple sessions helps you identify both organizational strengths and any specific areas that require further development.
But hard data and scores aren’t the only indicators here. Learner confidence is a massive driver of success, so use quick surveys, NPS scores, and direct feedback to assess how prepared your employees feel to actually use these newfound skills.
Organizational Application
Ultimately, the test for any of your training initiatives is how they translate into tangible workplace outcomes and actual behavior change amongst your teams. This is where L&D teams can clearly demonstrate value and ROI to senior leadership.
Don’t just look at the training platform for metrics – look at the business as a whole. How have things changed since the training program started? Or have they changed at all?
Gather manager observations that highlight a positive change in behavior or improved performance on the floor. Ask learners for specific examples of how the training saved them time or helped them navigate a real-life challenge.
Another highly overlooked indicator of success is organic internal demand – which is something we see a lot at VirtualSpeech. If you start seeing requests for program expansion, or if managers from other departments are asking how their teams can get access to the training, you’ve successfully deployed a training program with obvious, recognizable value.
Using Metrics To Prove ROI
There is no perfect way to measure learning results, no single magic metric that “proves” ROI. But by pulling together key qualitative and quantitative stats across these three areas, you can paint a picture of your training’s success – allowing you to answer stakeholders confidently when they ask how the rollout is going, while providing the insights necessary to keep refining your strategy for the future.
Your Next Steps Towards Building Great Training
There’s so much more that goes into creating a great training program that drives adoption than just the first 90 days. But getting those first three months right gives you an incredibly strong platform to continue building from.
Our latest resource, Beyond Completion: Building Training That Learners Actually Use, is a free downloadable guide that dives deep into every aspect of training adoption, including:
- Why the adoption gap exists
- What meaningful adoption looks like
- How to build a great training program that your learners will love
If you want to take the next step after learning about this 90-day framework, that’s where to start.
