6 Methods to Measure the Success of Your Corporate Training

If you’re very invested in corporate training or you’ve recently implemented new technology such as eLearning in order to improve the quality and delivery of training, as with all investments, you want to know how it’s doing.

So how do you measure something like employee training to determine its effectiveness?

Here are 6 methods for measuring whether or not corporate training efforts are a success or need some improvement:

1. Retention: We talk a lot about the difficulty many organizations have when it comes to retaining talent and also how important continual training and development is vital to retention, so why not use it as one of your primary metrics for the success of your corporate learning program? If you’re a large organization you can look at retention as a comparison between departments or positions and if you’re a small business you can simply look at your organization as a whole and see how your retention rates are doing, particularly if you’ve just begun implementing eLearning or some other type of new training strategy. If you don’t see a change in turnover, or even more troubling your turnover rates increase after the implementation of a new strategy, it’s probably time to rethink it.
2. Customer Satisfaction and Sales: Multimedia learning provides so many tremendous opportunities to train employees on customer service in ways that haven’t been possible before, and really create an environment that’s conducive to critical thinking and empowering employees to make customer service-based decisions. With that in mind, go to the source—look at your sales and see if they’re increasing, but also ask for the feedback of your customers to see how your employees are doing and in what ways that can be directly attributed to your training strategy.
3. Self-Reporting: Your employees are the ones participating in training, so let them provide you a measure of how well it’s going. Encourage employees to report on training as it’s delivered, and if you’re worried about getting an accurate response, do it anonymously. Multimedia-based learning is great for this because you can easily incorporate an assessment into each course that will show you what your employees think.
4. Attendance: Attendance is a really great, yet indirect way to measure training. You may be asking how training can be related to attendance—the reason it’s valuable is because it can show you how engaged and satisfied your employees are. Employees who feel like they’re being properly trained and developed are more likely to have better work attendance and fewer days of being late. Once you implement a new training strategy, begin looking to see if there are any improvements in these areas. It may show you that as a result of training your employees are feeling better and more engaged in the workplace.
5. Quality of Work: Some training may not be easy to relate to quality performance on the job—particularly when it comes to the development side, but for actual skills training, the quality of the work being done can let you know how you’re doing in terms of training. This can be particularly useful for the manufacturing industry because it’s possible to look at factors like the overall effectiveness of equipment and how the productivity improves as a result of training.
6. Performance Appraisals: A performance appraisal, especially one completed by employees’ direct managers or supervisors can give a really in-depth look at how the employee is doing, and when the metrics of the performance appraisal are directly tied to the objectives of L&D, it’s a really great gauge for looking at the effectiveness of your training materials. Rather than conducting a once-yearly appraisal, consider conducting them quarterly so you can track and measure changes on a more consistent basis and compare those changes to your new L&D initiatives.

Download free white paper How You Can Assess The Effectiveness of Your Training- Kirkpatrick Mode

Is there any other metric for measuring your eLearning or training we left off our list? If so, let us know.