Training Evaluation

Do you have a class of new hires starting soon? During the summer, many companies will bring in a class of recent college graduates and do all the training at once. Makes sense. It cuts down on training costs because you only are doing it once, not several times a year when you have one-off hires. But how do you evaluate those trainings? Depending on your organization, the structure of the training and the positions you're hiring for the answer to that question may be completely different. Some organizations may judge a training's success based on how much the new hires learned through tests and evaluations, other might judge training in six months based sale numbers.

These are good ways to evaluate training courses, but what about asking those being trained? Universities do it with end of course evaluations, professional development courses ask participants to complete professional development surveys after the class, even industry workshops ask attendees how they did.

A lot depends on your new hires, do they have the experience to recommend better training methods? Do they have enough industry knowledge to point out things you forgot? Chances are if you hired them, you think they have the smarts to answer these questions.

If you do this every year, you might think you have it down to a science, but there's always room for improvement. The best people to tell you how your training is going is the people you're training. People learn differently, and with changing technology, this is becoming even more true. Your training methods may work, but they could work better - you wont know unless you ask.

If you've used employee training surveys to evaluate your training programs, what insights have you learned to improve your next training session?