Training evaluation is one of those tasks that everyone agrees should be done, but is often left undone. It is sometimes treated as an afterthought to training, when in fact it is an integral part of the whole training process.
The lack of priority accorded to training evaluation impacts not just the effectiveness of training, but also the perception of L&D departments in the eyes of business leaders.
In this article, we will discuss why training evaluation matters to all training stakeholders—learners, managers, L&D departments and the organisation—and the essential elements of a well-structured training evaluation process.
Picture a hypothetical company, Penny Pinchers Pte Ltd. They allocate the equivalent of 4% of their payroll to their training budget and each staff is allowed to attend up to 40 hours of training per year. As an SME with 100 employees, training sets the company back $200,000 a year, not counting the 500 productive work days lost annually to training. This is no small expense to this small company.
As the year comes to a close and the P&L numbers are tallied, it becomes clear that revenue is down from the previous year, but marketing, payroll and training expenses are still taking up a big chunk of the expenses. The CFO starts looking for ways to cut costs in “non-essential” areas. Marketing is deemed critical to revenue growth and competitive salaries are necessary to retain talent. So the training budget becomes the first casualty.
Let’s face it: the training budget will be at risk whenever the company hits some economic road bumps. And who can blame CFOs and business managers? In a survey conducted by McKinsey and Company, only 25% of business managers thought that training and development contributed measurably to business performance (DeSmet, 2010 as cited in Pollack, 2015). More alarmingly, more than half of business managers were of the opinion that employee performance would not suffer if learning and development were eliminated completely (Corporate Executive Board, 2009 as cited in Pollack, 2015)
Because of this, slashing the training budget does not just impact the number of training programmes that can be run for employees. It could personally impact the L&D personnel who plan and run training.
In their book, Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation, training experts James and Wendy Kirkpatrick tell the story of Maxine, a training specialist who worked for a major corporation. One day, after seven years of serving the company, HR handed Maxine a letter stating that:
The Training Specialist position has been eliminated as part of a necessary reduction in force to align company resources with business needs.
She was stunned to be made redundant because she thought she had contributed a lot to the company by creating good training programmes and had never refused any training request sent her way. She didn’t realise that management saw training as a “nice to have” instead of a key ingredient of the company’s success. They thought this way because she had failed to make a strong business case for training, leaving training — and herself — in a precarious position.
Kirkpatrick goes on to write:
Training professionals who think only about training events and not what happens before and particularly after them will become extinct. They are already being replaced by inexpensive off-the-shelf and outsourced training. These will probably be no more effective, but they are less expensive…
There is therefore an urgent need for L&D departments to provide compelling evidence that employees are applying their training to their work, and that training contributes to the bottom-line of the company (Kirkpatrick, 2016). This is why training evaluation is so critical.
We have all heard the adage, “What gets measured gets done.” Ironically, training is often done but not measured. Without measuring training effectiveness, L&D will not have any hard facts and figures to justify training’s contribution to the company.
Essential elements of training evaluation
To be fair, many L&D departments do conduct course evaluation surveys with learners at the end of courses. These are sometimes called “smile sheets” because they simply ask learners if they were happy with the course. But smile sheets are useful for only evaluating participants’ Reaction to the course (ie, Level 1 evaluation). Some course providers even conduct tests at the end of the course to measure Learning (Level 2 evaluation). However, both Reaction and Learning say nothing about whether there was any transfer of learning to work.
To measure Behaviour (ie, Level 3 evaluation), companies send post course surveys to learners and their managers three months after the course, to ask if their staff put into practice what they learned. But what if the survey found that learners did not apply what they learned in the previous 90 days? Is it the fault of the training programme or was it because the learner didn’t make the effort apply his learning? Or did his manager not provide him opportunities to do so? We will never know for sure and even if we did, there’s not much we can do about it now that the training programme is a distant memory.
A process of follow-up and continuous evaluation after the course is over will keep learners and their managers on their toes, because they know that the company will be asking them to account for their learning investment. An effective training programme therefore consists of both training and follow-up, leading to improved job performance that positively contributes to key organisational results (Kirkpatrick, 2016). And the only way to determine if training contributed to improved job performance is to conduct a comprehensive training evaluation.
However, training evaluation cannot be a process that L&D departments undertake only after the course is over. Before the course is even designed, L&D professionals need to consult managers to understand their expectations: What the expected business outcomes should the course contribute to? What new behaviours do they expect from their staff after being trained? What will it take to make those behaviours occur? And how will these new behaviours and outcomes be measured? (Kirkpatrick, 2016) These must all be done before the course, so that an objective training evaluation be done after the course.
We hope this article has convinced readers of the importance of training evaluation. In upcoming articles, we will share some of the best practices in training evaluation and recommend some practical ways on how to evaluate training in your company. We will share how Learn Anchor can provide a convenient platform to help companies conduct comprehensive and effective training evaluations.
To find out more about Learn Anchor, watch the video below. Sign up for free for Learn Anchor today to start reaping the benefits of a comprehensive training management process.
Article references:
Kirkpatrick, James D. and Wendy Kayser Kirkpatrick (2016). Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation. ATD Press.
Pollock, Roy V. H., Andy Jefferson and Calhoun W. Wick (2015). The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development into Business Results. Pfeiffer.
DeSmet, A., McGurk, M. and Swartz, E. (2010). Getting more from your training programs. McKinsey Quarterly.
Corporate Executive Board (2009). Refocusing L&D on business results: Bridging the gap between learning and performance. Washington, DC: Corporate Executive Board.