How to Measure and Evaluate Training Effectiveness: Step-by-Step Guide

You might have heard from multiple sources that organizational training is valuable for your organization. Whether it’s marketing, sales, operations, or any other department.

All your organization’s departments are likely to benefit from training and development programs and, subsequently, through tracking employee training.

According to a survey by LinkedIn Learning on 1,260 L&D professionals, 64% of them believe that learning and development has shifted from “nice to have” to “need to have” in 2021.

This just goes on to show how important it is to measure training effectiveness. But, in the end, all organizations tend to ask themselves why one should measure training effectiveness in the first place?

Why Measure Training Effectiveness?

It’s important to measure the effectiveness of your training programs to understand how such programs impact your overall business objectives. If you know the effectiveness of your training programs, then and only then you can improve these programs to maximize their impact.

For example, if you are conducting product knowledge training for your sales team, and you later find out that these have had no impact on your sales. You now know that something’s wrong and can take corrective actions to improve this training program.

Here are 4 reasons why measuring training effectiveness is important:

1. Training May Work for Others but Not for You

   If you find yourself investing time and money in training but see no results, chances are that training is not working for you. You might need to solve other problems. For example, if your customer service training is having no impact on customer satisfaction, then maybe the issue lies somewhere else, probably in software bugs.

2. Are You Sure That You Are Delivering the Right Training?

   You can deliver effective training to your employees in numerous ways. Consider the case of training customer service representatives. Reflective listening? Product demonstrations? Or any other customer service training idea? How do you know which one works best for you?

   The answer is to measure and track employee training results, where you can experiment with different types and see which ones have the greatest impact.

3. Are Your Employees Spending the Right Amount of Time on Training?

   Are your employees spending inadequate time on training, or are they spending too much time? You can get these answers only if you effectively measure training time and compare it with business results.

4. It Helps You Prioritize

   You can prioritize resources depending on your results. For instance, if you see positive outcomes from your training efforts, you can increase your budget for these training courses and further improve them.

   The 4th Level on The Kirkpatrick Model for Training Evaluation – Results. By measuring the results from your effective training efforts – you can find out whether training is fruitful for you or not!

How to Track Employee Training?

The question now arises. “How to track employee training progress?”

Before we get to measuring the effectiveness of training programs, we must first understand how to track employee training progress. This will form the basis for understanding the effectiveness of the employed training programs.

This can be done in several ways, depending upon which training tracking methods best fit your organization.

1. Tracking Tools

   Tracking tools provide analytics on performance metrics. These tools can be in the form of an LMS or even a simple, easy-to-use video training platform. You can opt for platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo, which are more suited to cater to external audiences.

   Or go for a corporate video training platform like VIDIZMO is even flexible enough to help create your own YouTube-like platform that provides the benefit of both; internal private video streaming and streaming to external audiences as well.

   Sounds nice, right?

   Well, be sure to check out VIDIZMO’s very own EnterpriseTube, where you can create your personal video portal for your organization's use.

2. Assessments

   Several types of assessment or performance reviews can be used to track employee training progress. Pre assessments help you get better insights on whether employees understand the instructions and how they deal with differing situations.

3. Course reviews

   They play a big role when it comes to tracking employee training progress. These reviews offer greater insights on how to measure training effectiveness. These reviews can be anonymous to promote a more ‘open’ environment for a better learning process.

4. Observe Employees on the job

   This is probably one of the most common yet effective ways to track training progress. Directly observing employees allows you to see how they perform on the job and understand what areas can be improved.

   Be sure to make the observation process as transparent as possible. Otherwise, this can make the employees nervous and can be misleading.

   Now that we understand the steps, we can use to track training, let's jump into how we can use these training tracking methods to measure training effectiveness.

The Steps to Measure Training Effectiveness

According to a survey by Udemy Business of 500 professionals in 2020, it was found that 38% struggle to measure the ROI of their training programs.

Conducting complex experiments would be great! But doing so requires time and expertise. Here’s a much simpler step-by-step process that you can implement. It can be carried out by both small organizations and even larger ones.

To help you better understand, we have also included an example at every step, for measuring the effectiveness of training.

Step 1: Choose What to Measure

The first step is to identify variables to measure. You need to list both metrics for measuring your training efforts and metrics for measuring the impact as well.

Measuring your training efforts: you need to list ways in which you’ll measure your training efforts, which could be the amount of time or money spent on training, the number of hours of training videos watched, the number of employees trained, etc.

Measuring the impact: You need to list what matters to you and why you are conducting training in the first place. It’s important to list measurable objectives as opposed to broad goals. These objectives, however, will come from your goals. Do read more on goals vs. objectives.

Example: if your organization is trying to determine the effectiveness of training retail staff at your fashion store, your metrics to track training efforts will include the total hours of training watched, number of course videos completed, and the total number of employees trained. As your goals are to improve customer satisfaction and sales, you’ll list a sales objective such as revenue and customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

Step 2: Create Groups for Experimenting

The next step involves creating at least two groups, one of which is provided with training and the other is not. This is commonly known as A/B testing and it can help you with regards to the query we’ve all been asking; how to measure impact of training?

It’s important to note that you need to compare across one set of variables as it makes it easier to compare. This means including one variable to track training and one variable to measure impact of training. There are other important considerations, and you can read more here on how to do a A/B testing.

You provide one experiment group with no or limited training and this is called the control group. You provide a greater amount of training to the other group, which is called the challenger. This will help produce results that can be compared.

Too overwhelming? Let’s continue with our retail sales example to clarify it further.

Example: You provide one set of employees at one retail store with 0 hours of training. You then provide another set of employees at another retail store with x hours of training. We’d recommend picking stores that have had similar sales in the recent few months. This helps factor out any other variable that might be affecting your results.

Step 3: Collect Data

This step involves collecting data as accurately as possible. You can collect data manually, but if you’re doing this on a large scale and on a continuous basis, then we’d recommend using the right tools to collect your data from. We’ll be discussing what I mean by this later in the blog.

Collecting data for training delivered is easy due to reporting and employee training tracking capabilities offered by various training tools.

You can use an LMS such as Moodle, Blackboard, etc., to deliver your training. These provide reports on course completions, number of hours spent on training, number of employees enrolled in a course and more.

Or you can use a video training platform such as Vimeo or YouTube to deliver training. Or you can also use private internal video platforms (also referred to as Corporate YouTube) to deliver these videos. One such example of a corporate YouTube is VIDIZMO. These platforms are great as they provide you with metrics such as hours of videos watched, number of views, video completions and more.

Let’s continue with our example to show you what we mean.

Example: to record data for retail sales training, you can upload and privately share training videos with the challenger group through your private video platform like VIDIZMO. VIDIZMO provides you with the total watch time for your videos, which you can note. You can then note sales data for the products that you delivered training on through your POS system.

Step 4: Compare Results

The last step is to plot your data on charts and compare results across your control and challenger groups.

You can plot a simple bar chart to compare the control store with the challenger store like the one shown below.

Or if you conduct multiple experiments, then you can plot a trend line to track employee training and measure its hourly impact on your retail sales.

Conclusion

The 4-step process mentioned above is a simple representation and gives a theoretical overview of the process. You define variables, create groups, collect data, and compare!

You can start by implementing such a straightforward process or you can go one step ahead and scale your analysis. You can continuously collect data on the various metrics listed in step 1 and view results through means of dashboards. It’s important to use the right tools to collect your data as it helps you scale up your analysis based on how to track employee training.

Deliver training through modern learning management systems, video platforms or content management systems. Collect results from various POS systems, survey tools or your CRM. Choose systems like VIDIZMO that allow you to export data and connect it with dashboarding tools.

If your organization is already measuring training effectiveness, please feel free to share your approach in the comments section below.

If you are looking to implement a YouTube-like platform for training through means of video, feel free to visit our website to learn more or explore our video training platform using our free trial.