From the course: Practical Success Metrics in Your Training Program

Why evaluate participant learning?

From the course: Practical Success Metrics in Your Training Program

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Why evaluate participant learning?

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- Remember in school when your teacher called a pop quiz? I know, not something you want to remember. But there's a reason the teacher did this. They wanted to see how much you learned, and make sure you learned what you were supposed to. This is a level two evaluation. You're assessing how much knowledge people have actually retained from your training. You may not do pop quizzes at work, but companies invest a lot of money, time and hard work training their employees and expect them to do what they do properly. Simply, the fundamental purpose for assessing or testing employees after training are to build employee confidence in learning new skills. Prove to management that employees are competent. And to evaluate the effectiveness of your training. First, employees go to training to be better at what they do. But this change creates anxiety. Your role as a trainer is to focus on what they need to know to become better, and then help them build confidence in applying these skills. This helps you focus on precise areas requiring attention, assuring that when the employee completes the training, they are competent and feel confident with the new skills. Naturally, if you demonstrate employees are competent and confident with the new skills, then you've taken the first step to proving to management training worked. This is an important reason to test participants. Management expects when their staff attends a training session, they return better than when they left. Training is a tangible way to demonstrate to management that employees learn the skills you promised. Finally, another key reason to assess participants is to validate your training efforts were effective. Testing provides you with opportunities to verify whether employees actually mastered the skills to eventually improve their work performance. And if they didn't, this type of testing gives you an opportunity to adjust your training so that employees are learning what they're supposed to learn.

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