If you’re using a learning management system (LMS) to support your training activities, you know how important it is to collect relevant training data.
There are many types of reports you can use to track training progress, set new learning goals, and evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of your training programs. Knowing exactly what these reports do can help you choose the right ones for your evaluation processes.
With the right analytics, you can measure anything—course completion rates, learner activity on the platform, job-ready results, and more. These valuable insights will help you tailor your training to your workforce’s needs and preferences.
Let’s take a closer look at LMS reports you can start using today to optimize your training programs for sustainable success.
Why use LMS reports in the first place?
Training reports are as important for your L&D strategy as financial forecasts are for the finance team. Real-time reporting allows you to move forward, finetune content, and drive business growth. LMS reports enable you to:
- Make data-driven decisions that will boost your training ROI
- Understand your employees’ strengths and weaknesses
- Constantly adapt your training to your staff’s real needs
- Improve compliance training and boost its engagement
- Right-skill employees based on their competencies and job profiles
- Set clear organization and individual learning goals and track them
- Save money by giving up unnecessary training activities
Types of LMS reports your e-learning platform needs
There are two main report categories that LMSs offer to businesses:
- Built-in reports
- Custom reports
Built-in LMS reports are ready-made (usually within a platform). They have a fixed structure and include specific data the system immediately retrieves upon request. Built-in reports come in different formats and can include a wide range of training-related information, such as:
- Course attendance and completion statistics
- Assessment status and results
- Organization statistics
- Course revenue statistics
- Compliance training data
These reports are already available in the LMS and don’t need custom code. Users can simply click on the type of report they want, and the platform generates it within seconds. Built-in reports can often be downloaded or exported.
Custom reports contain the same type of information found in built-in reports, plus additional insights or more granular reporting. Users choose what data they want to get at selected intervals and can often go more in-depth.
For example, a trainer might not want a generic report with all the learners in their training group and course attendance, scores, or missing work. They can apply filters to eliminate certain fields from their reports or add new ones to get a combined report that only shows the attendance stats of one group of trainees.
Customized LMS reports are practical when an administrator or trainer needs quick access to specific training information.
The 12 types of built-in LMS reports that can streamline corporate training
Learning platforms can boost employee productivity in many ways. Because built-in reports make organizational and training data readily accessible, they save time and resources on manual tracking. As a result, instructors can keep stakeholders informed about:
- Training attendance
- Course completion rates
- Teams and workforce skills gaps
- Policy and compliance-related documentation
The Reports catalog shows a list of all the relevant built-in reports that instructors, managers and administrators can generate.
Here are some of the main built-in reports LMSs offer.
1. Site statistics
Site statistics reporting can help you understand how learners are interacting with your LMS. These generic reports can include a range of items such as the number of learners, instructors, courses, organizations, enrollments, active courses, assessments, files, etc. These reports offer a quick overview of your training efforts and their scale.
Action tip: Use site statistics reporting to provide a global or comprehensive overview of your e-learning platform and strategy. Consider this your “high level” look at what your L&D program has to offer.
Site statistics offer a comprehensive overview of your e-learning platform.
2. Organization statistics
Your company is probably divided into several departments. These can be represented in the LMS as different organizations.
With organizational reporting, you can create as many organizations as you see fit. Organization statistics reports will show you a detailed breakdown of each organization’s administrators, instructors, learners, managers, courses, groups, and more.
Action tip: Leverage organization or department reports to identify learning progress on specific teams. Identify skills gaps on specific teams. For example, you might use organizational stats to pinpoint a learning opportunity for sales and account executives.
3. Revenue reports
Revenue reports are a must if you sell courses to third-party entities outside your company. For example, many businesses choose to sell courses to franchisees or clients, which can be a great way to increase revenue.
These reports work together with other e-commerce LMS features. They basically show you how many courses you’ve sold, when, and how much revenue your courses generated.
Action tip: Pull revenue reporting quarterly to gauge whether course production and sales are contributing to the company’s bottom line. If not, you’re better able to troubleshoot or allocate resources to other revenue sources.
See important statistics related to online course sales.
4. Course enrollments
Course enrollment LMS reports include the number of learners who enrolled in a particular course by a specified date. They help trainers realize if their courses will reach the desired audience and whether they need to send more invitations for additional training sessions.
Action tip: Monitor enrollment reports carefully if you have required content to distribute to teams or new employees. For instance, HR leaders may want to verify that newly hired employees are successfully enrolled in onboarding courses.
5. Course status
These reports include two essential pieces of information – the number of learners participating in a course and its completion status. They also include the organization each learner is part of. Next to each person’s name, you'll see the date when they enrolled, whether they finished the course or not, and their result.
Action tip: Use personalized skills development to keep learners motivated throughout a course. This strategy recognizes the unique needs and learning styles of individual learners, and helps those employees or team members make progress based on specific priorities.
See information related to a specific online course
6. Course attendance
Course attendance reports show you how many trainees are currently enrolled in which courses and how often they attend virtual training sessions.
These reports help you pinpoint attendance issues, inactivity, or disengagement. They can help you motivate employees in hard times if you see they are lagging behind and struggle to accomplish their training and career goals.
Action tip: To boost learner participation, choose an LMS platform that offers gamification elements. Encouraging and motivating, gamified progress tends to keep learners engaged over time and until they complete assigned modules.
7. Course completion
As the name suggests, these straightforward reports show how many people have completed courses and at what date or time. You can schedule to receive them automatically in your LMS, or right after the due course completion date, so you’ll have a quick overview of how efficient the course was and how many people it engaged.
If it takes employees longer than expected to complete online training courses, this could be a signal that your staff lacks the skills required to complete learning tasks. Lengthy online training completion times could require some follow up to identify the root cause. For instance, online surveys and assessments can help disclose why corporate learners need more time to complete an online training module.
Action tip: Combine course completion reports with other metrics, like student engagement, to spot any “red flags” or at-risk students before they fall behind.
8. Assessment usage
These reports show you the different types of assessments, quizzes, and evaluations the LMS provides and how instructors can use them. These reports are great for new instructors who are still getting acquainted with the LMS or with learner outcomes.
Action tip: Use a blend of assessment and evaluation metrics to keep learners engaged. Before new sessions start, transparently communicate how participants will be evaluated once they’ve completed training materials.
See the many different types of assessments that are used throughout the platform
9. Missing work
This report shows which trainees have fallen behind with their assessments and didn’t manage to complete and submit them in due time. These reports are useful when you need to ensure new hires are up-to-date on their onboarding or compliance training. These reports also help trainers take action and help learners who might progress more slowly through a course.
Action tip: Always integrate a human connection in training programs, including the times when you need to correct or redirect learners. Doing so can help reassure learners that there is an actual purpose behind their coursework and assignments.
10. Policy reports
Policy-related reports help you make sure everyone in your organization has access to the necessary policy or regulatory documents. In this way, you see all the policy documents on the platform, which users have access to them and who accepted the site policies.
Action tip: Choose CYPHER to satisfy compliance and regulatory training in a way that’s modern, intuitive, and more engaging for learners. Because non-compliance can be expensive (both in money and reputation), taking time to keep everyone in line with policy is both important and protective.
11. Compliance reports
These types of LMS reports are a must-have and a must-use. One of the main advantages of having an LMS is that it streamlines compliance training. With these reports, trainers can get at-a-glance insights into the company’s compliance training and see which courses are required for this purpose, their status, and the number of enrolled users. They can quickly make adjustments if, for example, one team or department has failed to finish or even get enrolled in an important course.
Action tip: Stay on top of compliance training with compliance reports. Use a tool like CYPHER AI 360 to quickly create quality compliance materials in less time.
Stay on top of compliance training with compliance reports.
12. Custom LMS reports
Customization is key to a successful training program and ad-hoc LMS reports can help you create a more personalized and effective training experience. These types of LMS reports allow instructors and admins to define the parameters that are most impactful to reporting.
Custom reports help save a lot of time. You only gain access to the information you need the most without searching for it in a generic report.
There are multiple items you can include or exclude from ad-hoc reports, such as:
- Courses
- Users
- Organizations
- Scores
- Learning paths
- Learning goals
Here are some types of training reports you can customize in an LMS:
Scores reports
LMS platforms allow you to generate custom reports based on trainees’ results and list them in order from higher to lower, or vice versa. Use filters to show an accurate view of how learners are doing in their assessment, and intervene as needed.
For example, you can generate reports with scores below a certain minimum level, then contact the employees who achieved the lowest result and schedule a separate training session to help them close their learning gaps.
Score reports support trainers in achieving a program’s goals—whether they’re focusing on upskilling, right-skilling, or retraining staff. These reports play a pivotal role in helping companies improve their training programs and keeping employees on board. This is especially critical, as SHRM reports that 86% of HR leaders believe that training boosts retention.
Course completion reports
Custom course completion reports will show you how many trainees completed their courses and when. You can tweak these reports to see a certain list of learners or all of them and the date when each one completed their courses. This data can also be displayed in ascending or descending order.
Course completion reports help you understand which trainees struggle to complete their courses in time, which move faster on their learning paths, and which typically fail to meet their deadlines. Thus, you can take the most appropriate actions to support each one of them by changing the course deadlines or offering more study resources to learners who progress at a faster pace.
User and course reports
Custom user reports can be generated at an organizational level by including all the users in the platform or more restrictive reports that only include a specific department’s users. You can choose the courses you want to see in your report. For example, select those that are more recent or those that are due in the near future.
You can also get a generic, business-level course report that shows how many courses you have in each course style category (e.g. instructor-led courses, self-paced courses, blended courses, etc.).
These reports are important because they provide useful insights into what types of courses users generally engage in, how many LMS users are active learners, and generally, how your training progresses over the years.
Group reports
Group reports can also work at an organizational level, or you scale down based on need. It’s possible to get comprehensive reports on all the user groups in the organization or filter specific data. For example, you can generate a business report that displays the number of members by nationality or other demographics.
These reports can prove helpful both for L&D and HR departments. They show at-a-glance information about an organization’s staff and can help leaders make key business decisions. Since groups are social and communication features, they also give hints on how the organization’s members interact with each other and what their interests are.
Custom LMS reports feature handy charts that allow you to visualize data.
SCORM Reports
In the world of e-learning, SCORM is the technical standard. The acronym itself stands for “Sharable Content Object Reference Model,” and it’s essentially a playbook for how programmers need to design instructional content so that it works seamlessly with other learning platforms.
SCORM offers predictability. Course and content creators can more readily share learning content between LMS platforms.
A SCORM course is one that complies or adheres with these specific standards. SCORM status reports are available in SCORM-compliant courses, and they can illustrate status updates like:
- Where a learner or group of learners left off
- Interactions and learner engagement
- Whether a student was marked as Incomplete, Completed, Passed, or Failed
In order to access a SCORM report, you must be in a course (or within an entire platform) that’s already complying with those specific protocols.
Drive more business growth with LMS reports
Big data is everywhere nowadays, powering organizations from small to large. Having an LMS that assists learners and helps you easily train is a good start. But finding one also provides comprehensive reporting features is even better.
Reporting and analytics tools give leaders an instant overview of learning progress. Whether you want to see your new enrollments, course completion status, submitted assessments, or past due courses, all it takes is a few clicks.
Give your learning and development teams the advantage they need in a fast-paced learning environment. Chat with CYPHER today.
