The evaluation of training effectiveness: a major issue

The high cost of training spending naturally brings companies to wonder about their relevance. Direct training costs and the time spent in training by employees sum up to a very high financial commitment.

In addition, human resources departments are under increasing pressure to produce measurable results and to justify their budget.

The challenge of evaluating training effectiveness is to propose both a relevant and pragmatic tool, making it possible to monitor all the trainings and to justify the training budget.

The end of course evaluation form is not sufficient

The questionnaire distributed at the end of the training course allows training managers, at best, to identify the most serious problems and to evaluate the trainer's performance and the training logistics. While useful, this evaluation is not sufficient.

The effectiveness of a training course depends in particular on the actual utilization of what trainees learned during the course. The actual utilization can only be measured after a few months. Therefore, the "follow-up" evaluation is a crucial step to obtain a correct estimation of the impact of a training session.

The myth of the financial profitability measure

Following groundbreaking research by Donald Kirkpatrick, who proposed a framework for evaluating trainings (reaction, learning, transfer, results), many attempts have been made to try to measure the financial return from trainings.

The main methods which seek to measure training profitability are:

• The comparison with a control sample
• The analysis of operational indicators
• The financial estimate of the results of the action plans written after the training course

All these methods come up against the same problem: It is extremely difficult to isolate the effects of the training from the other factors contributing to the financial results. In addition, these methods are often very expensive to set up.

Expensive and unreliable, the measure of a financial profitability is not the appropriate way to evaluate training effectiveness.

Impact evaluation: an original and pragmatic solution

Trainees and their managers see the effects of trainings on their job and are therefore the best source of information to evaluate the training effectiveness.

We evaluate training impact by compiling key dimensions:

• The achievement of the objectives
• The implementation of the training course
• The effect of the training on the quality / effectiveness of the trainee's work

Effective questionnaires enable respondents to make a relevant assessment of these dimensions.

Benchmarking analyses make it possible to identify the most effective trainings as well as the trainings that should be improved or replaced. The evaluation reports make it possible to identify improvement levers.
In conclusion, the evaluation of training impact enables training managers/organizations to monitor and improve training investment.