In an organization, it the job of consultants to see the strengths and weaknesses of each of their employees. Organizations give a lot of importance to training. Training can boost the employee’s skills, their potentials, productiveness and their creativeness tremendously. While working on these factors, every organization has to keep in mind the ways of improving the brand and giving the organization a competitive advantage. Most of these organizations makes sure to remain fully focused and committed to training the employees and also spend quality amount of time, effort and finance on their training.
Having potential and highly skilled workers in an organization is one of the most strategic differentiators. But even today, with so much dedication towards training, the biggest question that has aroused today is: How effective was the training? These are some questions that even learning and development professionals struggle to answer. But these are crucial questions that cannot be ignored at any cost.
There were days when training effectiveness was judged on the basis of an exam or multiple choice questions. These are long gone. This method of testing the skills of employees were short-lived as it failed to prove that the employees did not learn much about the skills and expertise and apply them effectively in the long run of the organizations.
Objective
The main objective of training should not be based on the return on investment of the training but instead the main motive should be to ensure that the potential and skills of each of the employees are well nourished. The assessment center should ensure that the skills of a worker should enable him to carry out a task successfully and not just to pass a test.
Measuring Training Effectiveness
Most of the organizations all around the world invest heavily on the employees for their training and development. Along with nourishing the skills, potentials, and knowledge of the employees, measuring the effectiveness of training has proved to be an essential tool for boosting the employee engagement and retention. While planning future workshops, the measurements and results of past training also act as an important factor.
Companies ensure, they can put all the skills effectively in their work. In today’s world, with increasing focus on continuous development and learning, all the business organizations are more interested on identifying reliable methods and metrics to measure the effectiveness of employee training activity. At the end of the day, nobody would want to provide a training that would fail to deliver any result.
Below are few ways to measure the effectiveness of training:
1. Applying technology: For implementing a better and effective training applying modern technology is very necessary. In earlier days, employees were expected to demonstrate their skills and knowledge by simply an exam or performing a role play. However, involvement of technology has enhanced the level of the given role play. Introducing the use of smartphones and tablets to share and capture visuals to prove that the employees have completed a given task. A genuine access to the videos, screen shots and other visual proofs would strictly confirm to the managers who are in charge of the training that the training was taken in actual and that it also worked successfully. Along with the addition of the factors of how the various training effectiveness are measured, visual confirmations can have a great impact on the way you train employees by helping you distinguish between the most effective ways of training initiatives and also the most insignificant ones. And most importantly, these visual confirmations are much better as they can be accessed anywhere.
2. Encouraging social rights: Applying social ownership becomes a vital factor in measuring the effectiveness of training in such a way that it you to place the employees in a position where they will be able to teach others too. This will bring out a clear picture of the true level of mastery among the employees on a given subject. But why is social ownership important? This is because, it becomes an engaging and enjoyable concept as the employees are able to teach and learn from each other. It also gives the employees a good platform to show that the training was effective and the skills and expertise learnt during the training can be applied in real life as well. Social ownership also gives the employees to build a rapport with the other employees and engage with each other well. The training managers get the ability to access and evaluate how well the concepts are being applied within the company.
3. Skill evaluation: Evaluating the skills of the employees is one of the most important ways of measuring the effectiveness of training. Using visual confirmations is vital for assessing the employee’s skills and performance before and after training. Online assessments are also available that are needed for identifying the training gaps and measure the effectiveness of training. This gives you a clear idea of the performance and skills that you can specifically put down during the training. In other words, you can assess the work of an employee carrying out a given duty before training and carrying out the same job after the training to see whether they have acquired the skills genuinely or not.
4. Usage of data analytics: It is a fact there are so many developments going on at present in data analytics to make them modern, effective and updated. Using data analytics will definitely put you ahead of everyone in the competition during measuring the training effectiveness. It will also analyze the depth of the training. Data analytics also helps in examining the skills, potentials and knowledge developed during the training as it is applied within an organization. It will certainly help you establish the real success of training.
Someone who been given the responsibility of managing the training knows that measuring the effectiveness of training is very crucial. It is also an over whelming task. So it is necessary to place the ways properly for measuring training effectiveness.
