Evaluate employee training effectiveness

Not assessing the effectiveness of employee training can lead to wasted time, effort, money, even counterproductive…

Unlike in-school training, employee training in a corporate environment has a fairly consistent ultimate goal of making employees perform their current and future jobs better and more efficiently. To achieve that goal, employee training needs to be planned closely in all three phases of needs investigation before training, conducting training and evaluating results after training.

Rating levels

Evaluating the training is comparing the results after training with the expected goals of the managers. It is best to consider how training will be measured before proceeding. The difficulty level of training assessment increases when measures of response, learning, behavior, and outcomes are used. The value of training increases when it is demonstrated that the impact on assessment is at the behavior and outcome level, versus the response and learning level. Organizations often assess the response level of students by face-to-face interviews or questionnaires. However, immediate response can only measure how much students enjoy the training, not how much real benefit to them.

Tests on training content are often used to assess learning before and after training. The results are used to re-engineer the content of subsequent courses to be more effective. Evaluate training at a higher level than behavior, including measuring the impact of training on public performance. through interviewing trainees, and observing their work results after being trained. Behavior is harder to measure than response and learning, and even when behavior does change, the desired outcome may not be achieved. However, in some areas of activity where behavior is an important factor, such as customer contact, sales, direct customer service, managers can design a number of tools such as dashboards. Behavior monitoring to control the change in some key behaviors of employees in each area.

Organizations measure results by measuring the impact of training on the achievement of objectives. Outcomes such as productivity, quality, time, revenue, costs, and turnover are quite specific, this type of assessment can be done by comparing pre- and post-training data. The difficulty at this stage is to accurately assess to what extent the results are due to training or to other factors such as economic conditions, product demand, seasonality, effectiveness of programs, etc. long-term marketing, quality of employees…

Design Reviews

The most pragmatic way to evaluate training effectiveness is to look at the costs associated with training and the benefits received through a cost-benefit analysis. People measure the value of output before and after training, the increase represents the benefit derived from training. However, in practice, this type of cost and benefit measurement is often difficult to be precise. Therefore, benchmarking in training is often used. Instead of evaluating training internally, some organizations are using benchmark measures to compare organizations. Human resource professionals in one organization will collect training data and compare it with data in another organization of comparable size in the industry.

If the evaluation is done internally because there is no benchmark data. There are many ways to design and evaluate training programs to measure progress. Administrators can use post-training metrics to evaluate training effectiveness, by seeing if trainees can perform in the way the management wants them to. However, this measure also makes it difficult to tell whether the results achieved are due to training or not. Another indicator is to analyze the difference of the pre- and post-training measures to know the employee’s changes.

Methods using pre- and post-training measures with a control group are generally better than the two types of measurements above. Administrators can survey a different group of untrained (called control group) compared with the trained group, to evaluate training results. This assessment design assumes that performance measurement can be accurately performed in both groups, so any change in performance within the trained group can be attributed to training. However, some difficulties may arise, such as not enough employees doing the same work to create a control group, or the appearance of resentment or jealousy in the untrained group, leading to distorted results. distorted in a more positive or negative direction.

Source: Saigon Entrepreneurs