Any training program requires a measuring tool that will allow you to determine if it was successful or not. In a corporate setting, these measures will help you justify the costs that were spent as you create the course that will help train employees.
In any business, the need to train workers is important because it will help improve their skills and knowledge. The purpose is to make them more productive so they can make the company more profitable. For a training program to be truly successful, your costs to create it should not be greater than the profits that result from it. You need to be able to measure this in order for you to justify any future plans for the program.
It helps to start with a guideline. It is important to identify what you will be measuring or the evaluation tools that you will use. Will you be measuring the relevance of the course to the actual business operations through employee performance? This is needed to gauge how the employees will implement what they learned in real life. The relevance can also be measured in terms of the usefulness of the skills learned. You can also use a feedback program to measure the learning experience of the learners. You can even choose to measure the effectiveness of the course by segment and not the program as a whole. These guidelines will not only help you review one course. It will also serve as your guide for future programs that you will create. After all, a training program is continuous and is expected to happen every now and then.
Once you have the guidelines, here are the different areas that you can measure in your training program.
- Learner’s Reaction. Start by getting the reactions of the learners when it comes to the course. It can be as trivial as whether the program was entertaining, or something more profound like their overall perception of the course. This can be done by creating a feedback system that the learners can answer at the end of the course. Did the course meet their expectations? You can do this in the form of a survey questionnaire or a ranking system. The primary purpose of this is to help you improve future courses by finding out what the learners are looking for in a training program. Any mistakes can be corrected and the good ones retained or further improved. But more than that, it will help you recognize if the learners understood the purpose of the course. Somehow, this will be revealed in the feedbacks coming from the learners. Just make sure to make the feedbacks as objective as possible – rather than subjective.
- Learner’s Learning Progress. You should also put a measuring system that will allow you to measure the progress of each learners. This can be done by creating quizzes or activities after every segment of the training program. You can check how fast the learners are going through the program and how quickly they can retain the lessons learned. This will allow you to further scrutinize which parts are effective and which ones require improvement. You can use both statistical and assessment measures. Statistics will help you identify the behavior of the learners while the assessment will allow you to gauge the knowledge gained. You can check if everything is aligned with the learning objectives that you have set at the beginning of the course.
- Learner’s Implementation. This will happen after the course is through and has to be coordinated with the department leaders of the participants of the training course. Check with the leaders to see if the expected changes and improvements in the skills and knowledge are evident in their daily tasks. Admittedly, this will be the most difficult to measure. You need to rely on the opinion of those who may not understand what the training was all about. But then again, having a third person perspective may give you insights that you never had before.
Combining all three, with particular importance on the third, can really help you identify the ROI (return of investment) of the training program. Calculating the monetary success is very challenging but if your measurements in the other three are correct, you should be able to make the closest assumption of the success of your course.
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