Investigating the Value Provided from a Training Evaluation Survey

Whether you’re an HR Manager looking to improve your employees’ skills, or a training provider wanting to enhance the quality and relevance of your course, you’ll both want to know how well your training is being received and the value it’s delivering. That’s when running a training evaluation survey can be hugely advantageous in helping to provide you with the answers you need.

6 key benefits training evaluation surveys deliver

Evaluation should form an essential part of any training. However, you can gain even more value when you’re asking the right questions and delivering it in a more interesting and engaging way, such as in the format of an interactive survey quiz or self-assessment.

1) Increase your employees’ ability to retain more knowledge:

If there are training courses that you frequently send new company employees on, you’ll want them and your business to gain as much value as possible. Creating a quiz is a great way to test employees on what they learnt, they’ll also be more likely to revisit their course materials if you run regular quizzes which in turn helps them to retain more knowledge. This also helps encourage employees to think about how they can apply their new found knowledge to their job.

2) Improve how this knowledge is applied and shared across your business:

You can also use quizzes to evaluate how well employees have been able to apply their newly found knowledge in their everyday roles and if they’ve been able to pass this onto other colleagues in the business. Publishing quiz scores and offering prizes for the highest, can help encourage greater employee participation and a healthy competition among staff which can help boost productivity within your business.

3) Enhance the quality of any training you provide:

Improve the quality of your course trainers, teaching methods and any materials you use, through evaluation surveys that allow you to test the effectiveness of a training course and enable participants to anonymously offer their feedback.

4) Increase the satisfaction and number of your course attendees:

By regularly and consistently evaluating your course attendees and acting on the feedback they provide, not only will this help to increase their satisfaction with the training you provide, it will help you to improve the quality of your course and attract more attendees going forward.

5) Identify opportunities to introduce new courses:

By allowing you to see areas where participants may be struggling, or reveal patterns in your feedback, where attendees may be asking for more information in the same areas, it can enable you to identify areas where follow up training is required. It can also highlight where there is demand for you to potentially develop new courses.

6) Improve career development for employees:

Training evaluation surveys can also be useful in helping you to develop employees, by improving your understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Not only can it help you to keep track of their progress in their roles, it can also reveal whether they can still grow in their current jobs or whether they may be more successful in another position.

Identifying the best time to send your survey

Is it best to end every training session with an evaluation survey, or better to let knowledge sink in with your participants before you send them your survey or interactive quiz?

Given that research suggests that on average 70% of freshly gained information is forgotten 24 hours after a course has finished, it’s better to do this as soon you can.

The simplest way to do this is with a personal email message that invites them to fill out an online survey or assessment as soon as the course has ended. If you do this within the first 24 hours, this will ensure you get the most honest and accurate feedback.

How to use training evaluation results

Whether you’re an HR Manager or a training provider, once you’ve completed the process of analysing your results, you’ll want to get as much value from your survey as you can.

A good way to achieve this is to think about how the survey results can help you in the short and longer-term.

For example, in the short-term, feedback from a training course could allow an HR Manager, to assess how well the session was received by their employees and whether another course may have been more suitable instead. In contrast, a common complaint repeatedly reported by attendees could help a training provider to quickly re-assess a course and make any necessary improvements for their next round of attendees.

In the longer term, you could use the results of a training evaluation survey, to see how well it was helping you to meet your original objectives, which could include enrolling on a course or providing the training.

For an HR Manager, these longer terms objectives could include improving staff morale and retention, as opposed to the training provider who might be looking to increase overall customer satisfaction and sales of their training courses.

Maximising the success of your survey

For training providers, irrespective of whether you’re new to the business or well established, you’ll want the training you offer to be as good as it can be. Constructive course feedback is critical to this process, but this is only possible if you are covering the right areas and asking the right questions in your Training Evaluation Survey. Here are some key things you might like to consider:

How well is my course meeting participants needs?

To encourage attendees to return and to grow your customer base, you need to find out how satisfied attendees were with your course and to what extent it delivered the answers they required.

How attractive are my course materials?

Given the growing use of technology in today’s training offerings, particularly digital learning environments it’s important to find out whether your interface, learning environment and resources are appealing and user-friendly.

How engaging is my evaluation process?

Getting people to engage in your evaluation and remember what they learnt, is just as important as their interaction with you during your training course. Putting some interactivity and quiz-elements into your evaluation can help increase your engagement with attendees and enable them to retain the knowledge of what they have learnt.

How well was my course content delivered?

Asking for honest feedback about the content of your course can highlight what you’re doing well and not so well, and even reveal areas where you might be able to introduce additional material to improve the overall quality of your course.

For more information on questions to ask attendees, you may like to visit our survey templates, with examples to get you started which include: ‘Course Evaluation and Improvement’, ‘Training Services Evaluation’ and ‘Student Course Evaluation (Teacher Evaluation)’ templates.

Why training surveys are so valuable to your business

Given that companies who send their employees on training courses typically enjoy a 37% higher productivity rate those who don’t, the benefits of employee training are obvious.

However, none of the training benefits would be possible without a constructive feedback process that helps to maintain and improve the quality of course teachers, content and supporting materials. Thanks to the availability of the Training Evaluation Survey, and the wide range of ways in which this can be deployed this is easily achievable. So, whether you’re an HR Manager or a training provider, as long as you cover off the right areas, ask the right questions and make your survey as engaging as you can, you will be well on the way to meeting the objective you set out to achieve.