7 Hacks for Measuring Training Effectiveness: A Practical Guide for Companies

Henry Ford once said,

“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”

You might relate to this idea deeply. To train and develop your workforce, first, you search for the apt modules and the perfect trainers. Then you ask your employees and encourage them to take time from their busy schedules for the training. And when they finish, you expect them to perform and help the company succeed.

Did you know 68% of your workforce prefers to learn on the job^[1]? HR Leaders’ mindsets have changed drastically in the past two years. Now, 57% of the HR and L&D executives expect their training and development budgets to increase significantly this year.

Moreover, the opportunities to learn and grow in their careers turned out to be one of the most deciding factors for jobseekers.

Training and development is empowering; it’s also essential to organisational success. But it makes a difference only when you can measure it and take steps for improvement.

So how can you map the effectiveness of your employee development plan?

Let’s take a look.

1. Intelligent xAPI Metrics

xAPI, or Experience API, is an intelligent eLearning tool. It was a successor to the widely used learning platform, SCORM, but much advanced to map the learner’s progress. It supervises your employee’s every activity, including a click, comment and any other interaction on the module.

It is a tool to record and store information about trainees’ activities and share it across platforms to make it readily available for scrutiny. It enables you to monitor classroom activities, employee participation in online groups, one-on-one with the mentors, group discussions, performance evaluation and the final impact on your business.

2. Advanced HR Platforms

Gathering data is easy, but analysing it to derive actionable insights is difficult. The advanced HR tools today help you collect and analyse employee training data more perceptively. It extracts valuable action points for you to work on from a data repository. For example, you can understand how L&D impacts employee retention.

3. Feedback and Surveys

It may sound too familiar, but it can be beneficial if done promptly and correctly. You must not wait for the training module to finish in order to gather trainee and trainer feedback. Instead, collect feedback in real-time through in-depth and intelligent surveys to capture the essence of the module and key learning takeaways.

Capturing feedback before the training can help you take corrective measures if needed. Many SaaS platforms integrate user feedback with the module to ensure higher response rates.

You can also check the Net Promoter Score on a scale of one to ten to gather your employees’ feedback for each module element.

4. Visual Proof of Improvement

Things that you can see offer proof of existence. After the training, you can monitor employee behaviour and performance to understand the coaching module’s influence. For example, sales training involves cold calling and speaking with the client.

You can observe how they handle their client interactions on a call or in-person to identify any changes in their approach. Moreover, a jump in sales would be the perfect evidence of training success.

5. Evaluating Product Adoption

To operate in the IT/ITeS space, you need to impart software training besides soft skills, technical and vocational training. Product Adoption is the perfect means for measuring software training effectiveness.
Briefly, Product Adoption is the practice of using a product regularly until you get used to it. It aims at converting a product user into a satisfied customer. It primarily strives to provide value for money to the user.

6. Bite-Sized Learning

The emergence of microlearning modules has made training evaluation easier for HR leaders. Microlearning is the science of breaking down the coaching content into smaller modules.

When the classroom sessions become shorter and more focused, they are easier to measure and drive better results. In addition, the employees get lesser things to capture and exercise in a session, thus enhancing the training effectiveness.

Microlearning is much easier to track and is referred to as real-time or bite-sized learning. It offers the following advantages:

• The modern staff, especially the millennials and Gen Z people, learn better
• Deeper and quicker engagement
• Works better for the memory
• Leads to enhanced learning and business outcomes

7. Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Assessment Method

Kirkpatrick’s Model of four-level assessment was developed in the 1950s and is preferred by many organisations. It works on the below fundamentals:

A. Reaction: Gather trainees’ feedback on the module
B. Learning: Test the trainees’ skill enhancement through evaluation metrics like in-class tests and assignments.
C. Behaviour Analysis: See if your trained staff can employ the wisdom in their daily work life.
D. Business Results: Look for the organisational outcomes like sales, employee productivity, cost-cutting and profit increase. These metrics are an indicator that your training module is successful. Map their performance against the KPIs.

As Peter Drucker rightly pointed out, you can’t improve what you cannot measure. Evaluating employee training is critical for your organisation. It helps you to:

• Understand the impact on employees’ growth and performance
• Gauge the influence on business results and highlight if you are moving in the right direction towards your company goals
• Identify the issues in the training modules and take steps for improvement.

And if you have a large blue-collar workforce, training them becomes all the more important due to lack of quality talent, employee retention rate, next-gen labour force and the dependence on evolving technology.

Connect with our team today to understand more about polishing the mettle of your hard-working human resources.

Source(s):

1. https://learning.linkedin.com/resources/workplace-learning-report