Employee training programs are an integral part of every organisation and it directly contributes to its success. It is in fact a vital necessity for numerous reasons. The simplest of which is – to support employees in their endeavour to perform their jobs better and in the process aid their career progression within the organisation. Most employees, when they join an organisation, are proficient with a certain defined set of skills which they have developed over the course of their employment at their previous organisation. Once they join their current organisation, their previously learned skills may need honing and refining for them to adapt, succeed and progress in the organisation. And that is where employee training programs come in. So in essence, training is a golden opportunity for employees to expand their knowledge base and pick up new tricks and tips of their trade.
For any employee training program to be considered successful, it must be carefully designed, and the impact has to be measured. There are a few factors to be kept in mind while measuring and evaluating the impact of the training programs.
Keep a track of how many or what percentage of employees participated in the training. While this cannot be the sole criteria to measure the success of an training program. It most definitely lets you know that the training program was interesting and well-designed enough to appeal to a wide percentage of your workforce.
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TRAINING COMPLETION PERCENTAGE
Many a time, employees enroll for a training program with great enthusiasm but are quick to stop or drop out mid-way. Therefore, it becomes important to measure how many employees completed the training program versus how many enrolled for it. This gives an indication whether the program was interesting, informative and helpful for employees.
Every employee training and development program is crafted keeping in mind a specific skill or skills that need honing. Therefore, the success of a training program can be measured by evaluating that particular skill that was being taught. This also helps the organization discover employees with highly transferable skills and place them in a more appropriate project or department.
It may prove to be highly rewarding to take a look at the rates of internal hiring, better jobs performance displayed by employees who took training programs, customer satisfaction, reduction of consumer complaints, etc. These factors can be directly linked to training programs and will help evaluate the success of that particular employee learning and development programs.
Gathering and gauging employee feedback about a particular training and development program can prove to be highly useful. Employees look forward to training programs that directly help them perform their jobs better. And therefore will be motivated to provide accurate feedback. They even suggest what could be incorporated for a better success rate.
These are 5 important factors to definitely consider while evaluating the success of an employee training and development program. However, it is important to keep in mind that these cannot be the only 5 factors to measure the success of a training program.
The elements to consider will vary greatly according to the training being imparted. Also the learning objectives that are set by the Learning and Development departments as well as the objectives and goals of the organisation itself. Therefore, it will be beneficial to keep these factors as the backbone or structure. Upon which other factors need to be constructed to really measure the effectiveness of any employee learning and development training program.
