Evaluate your training

Why evaluate training?

Training costs can be significant in any business. Most employers are prepared to incur these costs because they expect their business to benefit from employees' development and progress.

The extent to which your business has benefited can be assessed by evaluating training. There are also other good reasons for evaluating training. It helps you to:

• track the development of staff knowledge and skills
• find out if the learning is being applied in the workplace
• identify training gaps and future training needs
• establish if the investment was worthwhile
• inform future training plans and strategy
• ensure training continuously improves

The problem for many businesses is not so much why training should be evaluated, but how. They often overlook evaluation, perhaps because the benefits - particularly financial ones - can be hard to describe in concrete terms.

It is generally possible to pin down the benefits, enabling you to make a sound business case for training, by choosing what you wish to measure or compare before and after training. You need to form expectations from training, eg increase in skills, reduction in errors or accidents, increase in workloads and decide how you will check that they have been met.

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• Why evaluate training?
• Improve business performance through training
• Measure training effectiveness
• Devise a simple training evaluation
• Evaluate more precisely
• Evaluate a range of training methods
• Next steps for developing training

 

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