Evaluating your training

Jun 26 2007 By Evening Gazette

When your business has invested in some training, how do you know if it was a success? Your gut feeling might be that skills and practice have improved. But in what ways and by how much has it improved, and did you get value for money?

You can answer these questions by doing some evaluation.

• Understanding precisely how a particular piece of training measures up will help you to select the best type of training for your business and get the maximum benefit from it.

• Understanding how much the training achieved can also help you identify any future training requirements.

• This guide looks at how evaluating training benefits your business. It also shows you ways of evaluating your training, and how to integrate these into your training strategy.

Why evaluate training?

• Training costs can be significant in any business. Most employers are prepared to incur these costs because they expect their business to benefit from employees' development and progress.

• The extent to which your business has benefited can be assessed by evaluating training. There are also other good reasons for evaluating training. It helps you to:

1. track the development of staff knowledge and skills

2. find out if the learning is being applied in the workplace

3. identify training gaps and future training needs

4. establish if the investment was worthwhile

5. inform future training plans and strategy

6. ensure training continuously improves

The problem for many businesses is not so much why training should be evaluated, but how?

• They often overlook evaluation, perhaps because the benefits particularly financial ones - can be hard to describe in concrete terms.

• It is generally possible to pin down the benefits, enabling you to make a sound business case for training, by choosing what you wish to measure or compare before and after training.

• You need to set objectives for training, for example: increase in skills, reduction in errors or accidents or increase in workloads and then decide how you will check that they have been met.

Improve business performance through training

The environment in which you do business is constantly changing, so the knowledge and skills you will need to keep up with developments will change too.

To keep ahead of your competitors, you need a strategy for training which:

• looks at where your business wants to be

• identifies the training needed to get there

Implementing a positive, dynamic training policy will bring tangible benefits to many areas of your business. For example:

• Staff will respond to your commitment to their career development and are likely to become more motivated to perform well and be dedicated to the business.

• Well-trained staff will be able to complete tasks more quickly and efficiently and productivity may go up.

• Regular evaluation of completed training will help you identify skills gaps in your workforce and take early steps to avoid the problem.

An effective training strategy is integrated with business planning and staff development. The process of evaluation is central to its effectiveness, helping to ensure that:

• your training budget is well spent

• people give their best as individuals and teams

• you achieve consistently high standards

• a culture of learning and continuous improvement is established in your business

• your business develops a best practice approach people want to work for your company

Measure training effectiveness

Evaluating training is not just about whether new skills have been learnt or performance has improved. To get meaningful information, you need to measure what has improved and in what ways. Set specific objectives for the training. For example, you may want to increase:

• the efficiency of a particular process

• the number of returning customers

• staff motivation

Decide how to measure the objective. Quantifiable objectives are easy to measure such as the number of goods produced or the number of repeat orders.

Objectives about quality or behaviour are more difficult. For example, if you want to measure staff satisfaction, you might look at:

• promptness of arrival

• levels of performance

• days off sick taken

• engagement in teamwork

If you wanted to measure negotiating skills, you might try discussing case scenarios, asking targeted questions and observing work in context.

Use feedback from trainees, colleagues and managers to get data for qualitative assessment.

For example, devise a questionnaire to gather specific information.

Try to express each objective in financial terms by costing the desired outcome of the training. This might cover:

• profit made

• time saved

• productivity increased

• absenteeism prevented

• Ensure objectives are achievable. Don't have unrealistic expectations. For example, staff will be de-motivated by exaggerated sales targets.

• Take measurements before, during and after the training to chart progression and help trainees identify their goals.

• Re-evaluate at regular intervals. It gives a more accurate picture and shows whether improved standards are maintained.

Devise a simple training evaluation

Deciding how you will evaluate the training should be a key part of planning training activities.

Before the training

• Set your objectives, including financial ones.

• Decide how you will measure the objectives.

• Establish the situation before training using these measures.

• Identify the improvements you are aiming for.

• Identify why you have chosen this particular training method, eg competitive price, trainee's preferred learning style, flexibility of delivery.

• Evaluate a range of training methods and choose the most suitable.

During the training

• Ask the trainee to reflect on their understanding and enthusiasm throughout.

• A well-designed piece of training will ask them to do this as part of the learning process, eg through interactive sessions and practical application, with regular recaps or by completing feedback forms at the end of each session.

After the training

• Measure your objectives at agreed time intervals.

• Get detailed feedback from the trainee.

• Re-test knowledge and skills and compare with pre-training results.

• Review the performance of the chosen training method.

• Observe the trainee's new knowledge and skills in context.

• Identify any remaining training gaps, and include them in future plans.

• Review your return on investment.

• Give feedback to your training provider - this may help them improve their service.

Evaluate more precisely

• You may need a sophisticated evaluation method if you want to identify the value of training very precisely.

• If you want to design the evaluation yourself, a classic approach is the Kirkpatrick model of training evaluation.

• It divides the process of evaluation into four key stages - Reaction, Learning, Behaviour and Results.

Reaction

• Get feedback from trainees about the training. To get the most complete picture, ask both open-ended and closed questions.

• Answers to open-ended questions such as lWhat were the main strengths of the training give qualitative data.

• Closed questions that give more restricted answers result in quantitative data.

Learning

• Measure skills, knowledge and attitudes before and after training.

• Observe skills in the workplace or in a specially-designed demonstration, or devise tests to assess knowledge of principles and facts.

• One approach is to base the measurements on learning outcomes that the training is designed to achieve.

Behaviour

• Find out if training has influenced the way a job is done. This can be tricky, especially if the training is in people skills such as leadership and negotiation.

• What you're looking for is whether the knowledge and skills learned have been transferred into the workplace.

• Before and after assessments will give the most accurate picture of how things have improved.

Results

• Quantitative and qualitative information from the first three stages provides the evidence you need to measure business outcomes.

• Results should be written up, shared with everyone involved, and fed back into your training strategy.

• Compare data before and after, leave sufficient time for the training to take effect before you measure outcomes, and repeat the exercise at intervals to see how the benefits are sustained.

Business Link works with you to build an understanding of what your business wants to achieve and can help identify the most appropriate training and staff development and, if appropriate, assist with the identification of funding to ensure you achieve your objectives. Call Business Link on 0845 600 9 006 or email info@tees.businesslink.co.uk to see to see how you can improve your business performance.