Evaluate Business Performance through Knowledge and Training
Skills
When any business has invested in some
training, how we would know if it has been a success? This article
explains the way of evaluate any business performance involved in training.
I would summarize the basic
questions for this article in the following How’s!!
- How to identify training gaps and future training
needs?
- How to inform future training plans and strategy?
- How to ensure training continuously improves?
Answering these questions will guide us
to the right path to evaluate any business performance involve in training. The
main process to deal with efficiency in training is to make sure the business
reach three points:
- The efficiency of a particular process
- The number of returning customers
- Staff motivation
Measuring the efficiency of training
skills is very simple by evaluating the reaction of the provided training
method, by asking: What are the participants’ feedbacks on the training? This
is typically measured through a survey and usually covers such items as program
methodology, group and individual exercises, quality of materials and media,
facilitator capabilities, facilities, etc.
This will drive us to the process of
collecting; analyzing and reporting information to assist us understanding how
much participants learned and applied what they have learned in the learning
environment. Measure these results at
the group level by summing monitoring results up to the group level we will be
able to better determine if the overall training is the issue versus individual
ability.
Unfortunately so many
organizations do not measure training effectiveness. Training evaluation is
always a challenging area, especially when training new recruits because it is
necessary to have a clear understanding of their baseline before the training
starts; otherwise we can not be sure how far they have progressed as a result
of their participation in training and these facts face those who deal in
training through business side. In my opinion before we go for measuring and
monitoring the efficiency, we need to decide which training programs we are
going to measure and consider?
It may be that we want to check that a
training program is meeting its objectives, or identify how a training program
can be further improved. Deciding this should help us consider which information
we need to collect and how we will collect it.
For second part in evaluation, we need to
make sure that our evaluation methods are appropriate to the training program
we are measuring and to our time and budgetary constraints. Organizations
typically use such things as observation in the workplace, surveys or
questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, performance monitoring and collection
of financial data.
Last part in evaluation training program
is the timing of evaluation. Timing is also key- best practice suggests that a
two-part approach should be taken. In the first place, trainees' reactions and
learning during the training program should be considered. Secondly, we should
take into account how training is applied in the job and what the benefits are
afterwards.
Dr.
Kayyali Mohamed,
CEO
4D Business Consulting
BCS
Chartered Scientist & Fellow
FBCS
CITP