E-learning and LMS blog articles

Investing in a learning management system (LMS) means you’ve taken the strategic decision to help your organisation improve employee skills and development, streamline training, and build a culture of compliance. But once your LMS is up and running, the next question is whether it’s actually working. More specifically, is your LMS (and perhaps your LMS provider) delivering on its promises?

Understanding the effectiveness of your LMS is the key to unlocking its true potential. Not only will it help you prove a tangible ROI, it will also ensure you’re able to align training with organisational goals and continuously improve the learning experience.

In this blog, we’ll break down the key performance indicators (KPIs) for e-learning that UK organisations like yours should be tracking to ensure their LMS is delivering a real impact. We’ll also explore how our award-winning Totara Learn LMS can help you not only track these KPIs but also make the process smarter, faster, and more insightful with automation.

TLDR - How to measure LMS effectiveness: Key LMS success metrics

• Why it matters - Measuring LMS success helps you prove ROI, align learning with business goals, and improve outcomes.
• Define success - Whether it's better onboarding, compliance, or upskilling, start by identifying what LMS success means for your organisation.
• Track engagement - Low engagement undermines LMS value. Monitor logins, participation, and time spent on training.
• Measure completions - Completion rates show whether learners are finishing training, crucial for compliance and L&D progress.
• Check knowledge retention - Use assessments to ensure learners understand and retain what they’ve learned.
• Monitor compliance impact - Track metrics like time to compliance and certification status. Hubken client St. Helens Council completed 1,600 in 4 weeks using our Totara Learn LMS.
• Calculate ROI - Demonstrate value with time and cost savings. Hubken client Dermaroller saw a 50% reduction in onboarding time after LMS rollout.
• How Hubken helps - We deliver Totara and Moodle LMS solutions with expert support, enhanced reporting, and KPI-driven success strategies.

Why measuring LMS effectiveness matters

For many organisations, implementing an LMS is a significant investment, not just financially but in time, training content, and internal resources. So understandably, it’s important to measure whether that investment is truly delivering value. However, without the right LMS success metrics, it can be difficult to measure real impact.

LMS effectiveness isn’t just about cost savings; it’s about engagement, knowledge retention, compliance impact, and real-world application. By tracking the right KPIs, UK organisations can turn LMS data into actionable insights that can help drive smarter L&D.

What does LMS success look like?

Before outlining the best KPIs for learning management systems, let’s first consider what ‘success’ looks like in the context of your LMS.

The answer will vary depending on your organisation’s goals and L&D strategy, but having clarity on this from the outset is instrumental in measuring the right outcomes. Start by asking yourself questions such as:

• What are we trying to achieve with our LMS?
• What’s our primary goal? For example, measurable compliance training, ongoing CPD, or quick and effective onboarding.
• What would a measurable improvement look like for us?
• How can we align our LMS and e-learning strategy with wider business objectives?

Whatever your goal, it all comes down to impact. Is your LMS driving measurable improvements? With this in mind, you can begin to look at the effectiveness of your LMS and track what’s actually working for your organisation.

Best KPIs for learning management systems:

Engagement and adoption

One of the quiet disruptors of LMS effectiveness is poor user engagement. If your learners aren’t logging in regularly, completing courses, or interacting with content, even the most well-designed e-learning strategy will fall flat.

Low learner engagement doesn’t just impact individual L&D; it undermines the overall value of your LMS investment, so monitoring LMS engagement and adoption is an essential KPI to track from initial implementation and beyond.

To get a true picture of engagement, you can use your LMS's analytics and reporting tools to monitor areas such as login frequency, time spent on courses, and user participation. This data will help you identify which areas of the platform are underperforming, which content may need improving, or if certain teams need more support.

Completion rates and learner progress

Once learners are engaging with your LMS, the next step is understanding whether they’re actually making it through key training. Completion rates are one of the most widely used LMS success metrics because they provide a clear picture of whether training is being followed right through to the end. This is particularly critical for organisations focusing on compliance training, as completion data is critical for audit readiness.

If your learners are consistently dropping off partway through a course or struggling to complete learning on time, monitoring learning progress at a granular level using LMS data can help you understand where the issues may lie.

When analysing completion data, try to identify patterns that highlight issues such as over-complicated content, a poor user experience, or lengthy content that doesn’t fit into busy schedules. With this data, you can make meaningful changes, such as incorporating microlearning for bite-sized training that can easily fit into a busy working day.

Knowledge retention

While completion rates and engagement are valuable KPIs, one of the best metrics for indicating true LMS success is knowledge retention, as ultimately, the goal of training isn’t just to complete a course, it’s to retain and apply what has been learned.

Here, LMS assessments can provide valuable insights into how much information is being absorbed, whether learners are improving over time, and whether they’re able to put their knowledge to use in a working environment.

With an LMS such as Totara Learn, you can build assessments into courses to gain a clear understanding of learning impact. Whether it's end-of-topic quizzes or mid-quarter knowledge checks, you can set automatic pass/fail thresholds and share results with key stakeholders to ensure learners receive the support they need and that your strategy or content is amended when retention is low.

Compliance management

For many UK businesses, particularly in highly regulated sectors such as  healthcare or the public sector, LMS success is tightly linked to compliance management and impact. When an effective LMS is performing as intended, it removes barriers created by manual compliance management by automating key processes and provides peace of mind when it comes to adhering to regulatory training requirements.

To prove that your LMS is delivering value, you need to track how well it’s supporting your compliance goals, and that’s where compliance becomes a key performance indicator.

A valuable compliance KPI metric is time to compliance, such as looking at how quickly new employees complete required training or how efficiently staff renew certifications. A powerful real-world example comes from Hubken client, St. Helens Council. When they implemented our Totara Learn LMS, their goal was to improve compliance across the organisation. Within the first four weeks, they tracked a remarkable achievement: over 1,600 employee certifications completed, which provided clear evidence of how quickly and effectively the LMS supported their compliance objectives.

Other compliance-related LMS KPIs include certification expiry rates, the frequency of overdue training, and the number of learners who pass or fail compliance assessments. These metrics offer real-time visibility into whether an LMS is successfully helping your organisation stay on top of regulatory compliance or falling behind.

ROI: The KPI that proves your LMS is worth investing in

When measuring LMS effectiveness, looking at ROI as a KPI is a metric that answers a powerful question that your key stakeholders will no doubt want answering: Is your LMS delivering measurable value to the organisation?

Measuring corporate training ROI with an LMS as a KPI is less tangible compared to straightforward metrics such as course completions, but it’s absolutely measurable with the right approach. For example, consider the cost and time savings your organisation gains by switching from face-to-face training to e-learning or reduced administrative hours when leveraging LMS automation functionality.

You can also look at ROI in terms of training outcomes. For example, has the LMS helped reduce onboarding time? When Hubken client  Dermaroller implemented our Totara LMS, they saw a 50% reduction in onboarding time, which demonstrated a significant efficiency gain and ROI in action.

While ROI as a KPI may not be easily expressed in a single percentage or value, it can always be tied to measurable outcomes that demonstrate the impact of your LMS.

How Hubken can help you achieve LMS success

Measuring LMS success and effectiveness doesn’t have to be complicated. By focusing on the right KPIs, you can easily build a clear picture of your platform’s performance and take meaningful action to improve it.

Of course, tracking the right metrics is only part of the equation, and what truly drives long-term success is having the right tools and support.

At Hubken, we understand that implementing an LMS is only the first step. To drive real results, you need ongoing insight, support, and a platform that evolves with your organisation. That’s why we specialise in delivering powerful  Totara and  Moodle solutions alongside a fully supported service that includes expert training, powerful enhanced reporting capabilities to track KPIs, and ongoing (unlimited) support to help you measure, refine, and grow.

If you’re looking for a solution that drives real results, supported by people who genuinely care about helping you achieve LMS success, get in touch with one of our LMS experts today.