Foundation skills training programs are made to help develop your business, to improve the brand, and to help employees gain new skills and new knowledge. These courses can help for every single part of your company, and no matter if you are a part of a small business or a huge corporation, you can benefit from corporate training.
In this article, we are going to talk about the ways you can measure the effectiveness of the course and how you can notice if the program was a success or a fail. Before the training starts, make sure you check the data and the information on your work process and company data and plan the goal you hope to be reached once the course is over.
1. How did the participants react to the course?
To measure the effectiveness of the foundation skills training program, you have to access pretty much everything. Once the course is over, see how your employees reacted to it. You can talk to them face to face, or can just ask them to complete an anonymous survey. When you talk to them personally, you can get more details about the program, but when they don’t have to put their name somewhere, chances are, they will be open and objective.
See if they liked the course if they think it was effective and if they would be open to other similar courses. Some people say that the wrong types of programs are boring for them, it is a waste of their time and that they wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.
If you get negative feedback, it does not mean that you failed, it just means that there is room for improvement. Even if the course proved to be a success, see what the negative remarks were and how those things can be improved.
2. Did the participants gain new skills?
The next thing you need to measure is the knowledge and if your employees gained a new skill. For this part, you need to think about your primary objective and your overall goal. If your goal was to help people work faster, better, or have better communication with your customers, then you should evaluate this.
According to hackspot.co, learning by doing is far more effective than passive learning, because the participants will be able to try things out on their own instead of just watching the instructor do and say things.
Remember that this is not high school and that a written test will not help you access things. You can talk to the participants, see how they feel, and if they see an improvement. In a few weeks, or after a month, you will be able to really notice if your employees gained some new skills and if they know how to use them in their jobs.
3. How did the program affect the learner’s performance?
These programs are designed to make people better and to improve as many of their skills as possible. The best way to notice if the program was a success is to see if the employees are able to transfer their knowledge to others in the company. We learn when we teach, and we remember things once we say them out loud.
Check to see if the trainees are aware their performance has changed and if they feel better and more confident. The knowledge will be assessed when they start using their new skills, so you should pay close attention to that. Don’t expect to see changes and results right away, and remember that you will need to conduct interviews and observation over the next 6 months to one year.
There isn’t any doubt that one-on-one classrooms are the best, according to StudyMind, but that cannot be achieved all the time.
4. Did the participants use the new skills in their jobs?
Once the course is done, you need to follow how your employees and yourself reacted to the whole program. The outcomes need to be monitored and you need to pay attention to several things.
Check to see if there are fewer mistakes and delays after the course is over, monitor the customer satisfaction and retention, and check the number of complaints. All of these things should be improved if the course was effective.
Other things you need to pay attention to include the number of sales that are made per month, the productivity your employees have and the retention. You should also pay attention to their behavior and see if conflicts are resolved with ease.
When you have all of the data, and if things are positive, you will be sure that the participants used the new skills they gained and they improved the whole brand with them.
5. Was the main goal achieved?
The last way to check the effectiveness of the course is to ask yourself if the main goal for the whole process achieved. You should go back and think about why you wanted this program and why did you enroll your employees in it.
You won’t have an answer to this question right away. If your workers were motivated by this course, they are going to feel energized and they will want to do better and achieve more. However, you should disregard the first week after the course, and see what is happening a month after the whole program is completed.
If you wanted to speed up the production process, wait and after a few weeks compare the data you had before and the new data. In case you wanted your employees to gain new skills, communicate better, and improve their overall behavior, then you should measure and compare that data.
Depending on the results you get, you will be able to access if the whole course was a success. The statistic shows that more of these courses are successful, and there is a huge improvement in the whole company, but remember that some things depend only on the participants and their will to change themselves and do better.
Remember that you will need at least a few months to notice if the whole course was a success. Give yourself and your employees time to put their skills to use and do everything you can to help them. See if the trainees were overall motivated by the course and if they are happy they went through the training.
