Whether you have thousands of users, thousands of learning resources, or both, pinpointing the most beneficial training courses and content can be overwhelming for any L&D professional.

The Quick Fix

By plotting the data on a chart, you can compare the frequency of certain categories or actions. For example, let’s identify the most popular content selections within an organization by:

1. plotting the categorical variable, or the characteristic you’re evaluating, on the x-axis (i.e., content).
2. plotting the frequency of the variable on the y-axis (i.e., number of times a piece of content is accessed by learners).
3. arranging the data from highest to lowest frequency to quickly identify the most-accessed content.

The Deep Dive: Long-Tail Distribution

When reviewing data around learners’ content usage and activity, it’s common to find that learners use the same few pieces of content significantly more often than the majority of other resources—which also means there’s probably a large number of underutilized resources. Similarly, there’s generally a small number of employees who are significantly more active than their peers.

In statistics, this is known as the “long-tail” distribution because, as you plot the results on a graph, you’ll see a peak at the start with a long tail of dwindling results along the x-axis.

Chances are, the long-tail distribution applies in your organization, too. For example, it might tell us that:

• 10% of learners are responsible for 80% of forum posts.
• Each month, one e-learning course is used thousands, another five courses are used more than 100 times, and the remaining hundreds of courses are used less than 100 times.
• A handful of salespeople are responsible for more than half the sales (see Chart 1).

Chart 1: Sales contribution by employee

The Benefits of Long-Tail Distribution

Identifying the long tail in a data set and the people or resources at the top of it can be hugely insightful in directing time and money to where they will have the most impact. For example, by identifying:

• the handful of learning materials that support the majority your organization’s learning, you can focus your spending on optimizing those resources rather than expending effort on the hundreds of resources that are less used.
• your most active learning platform users, you can gauge their feedback and help you promote the platform to others.
• your top performers both in terms of assessment and job performance, you can focus retention efforts to ensure you keep, reward, and encourage your best people.

Things to Consider

Of course, these insights need to be used within the context of your organization’s particular situation and considerations. For example, pilots form a relatively small portion of an airline’s workforce. As a result, pilot training may not appear as popular when compared to the usage of other learning experiences within the entire organization. Clearly, this doesn’t mean pilot training should be ignored. Instead, this is an indication that data (and perhaps training budgets) need to be segmented by job role as part of learning evaluation.