How To Evaluate The Effectiveness Of A Training Program?

Viren Kapadia June 30, 2020
How To Evaluate The Effectiveness Of A Training Program?

The need to have a well-structured training program within companies has been very well established, and accordingly, several of them have been taking efforts towards developing one. Ensuring that employees are put through the right set of training sessions can enable them to perform to their optimal potential. However, like all other business endeavours, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of training programs, failing which they could turn out to be an effort in vain. The following article describes different factors that could be kept in mind while performing such evaluation:

Performance on Tests

Just as it works in an academic environment, employees after being put through a training module need to be required to take various tests to assess how well they have grasped the topic. This serves three purposes:

  • - Knowing that they have to undergo tests after the training session will ensure that employees take the training seriously
  • - Employees’ performance on tests will enable managers to determine how much of the knowledge that was sought to be imparted through the training has been assimilated by the trainee employees on an individual basis
  • - The collective performance on the tests will enable managers to determine how effective the training module itself has been, and to determine if the content and structure requires any modification.

Ability to Apply Newly Acquired Skills

This is mostly going to be a subjective on-the-job assessment by managers. Once employees have been put through a training session, they would be expected to apply their newly acquired knowledge and skills in live work environment. Alternately, employees themselves could be encouraged to share their views on how easy or difficult they find it to apply the knowledge that they have been imparted in the work-setting. By tracking how effectively they are being able to implement the new learning, managers can determine how effective the training program itself has been, and more importantly, how relevant the content of the program is to the business requirements of the company.

Productivity Improvement

Any training session that does not result in quantitative or qualitative improvement of the productivity of an individual employee or team would be pointless. As such, managers need to devise a set of metrics to be able to measure how useful the training program has been. Through this, they would be able to determine how much business value the training program serves, and also identify areas of improvement in the program which could be worked towards.

Surely, performing an evaluation of each training module by taking into consideration the above three aspects will enable the organization to evolve a highly effective and holistically beneficial training program. Such programs will go a long way in ensuring better employee motivation and commitment levels, enhance business performance, and improve employee retention rate.

To facilitate such a comprehensive evaluation, it makes a lot of sense for organizations to adopt the use of a Learning Management System (LMS), which can ensure a centralized coordination and monitoring of all training activities and enable the company to keep a record how effective different modifications to its training program have been. In this regard, the LMS offered by Gyrus can prove to be especially beneficial. Not only does it provide real-time insight about the response of each employee during a training session, it also helps in obtaining reports on training effectiveness with easy-to-read visualizations.