How Your Ego Could be Getting in the Way of Improved Training

Which do you think was the better movie:  Spider Man (2002) or The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft? How about Titanic or Gone With the Wind? Silly questions, you say? Of course, unless you judge movies only by their box office receipts. Because that's the industry norm, Spider Man is the "bigger" movie because it earned more than four times as much as The Graduate.

Titanic did three times the box office of Gone With the Wind. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a hoot. The point is, box office is easy to measure; quality is not. Most people settle for measuring what's easy to count and yields results that feed their egos.

The same is true in evaluating training. I can't tell you the number of times I've asked how a company measures their employees' training and gotten an answer like this: "We trained all sixty sales people in two weeks and everybody was really pumped after that." The trainers at one of my largest clients a few years ago (a division of a major retailer) were given bonuses based on the number of attendees in their classes. Do you believe it? Again, we have a number that's easy to determine, but is almost useless.

Filling seats is not a goal; it's a trainer's responsibility. Beyond that, it says nothing about the value of the training in helping the organization meet its business goals. These days, that's what matters.

Three Key Questions

The measurements of training that really matter answer these three questions:

• Did they learn anything?

• Are they using what they learned on the job?

• Is the changed behavior or new knowledge improving business results?

If you look at the training in your company and you can answer these questions positively, then the training is an investment, not an expense. And it's really not very hard to get these answers. You just have to start at the goal and work your way backward to design your training evaluation program.

Five Simple Steps to Evaluating Training

1. Identify the employee behaviors and knowledge needed to improve business results. Let's say you want to reduce the number of sales proposals that are rejected. You investigate and find that many salespeople are losing sales because they aren't negotiating effectively with their prospects. Now you're on the right track. 

2.  Establish some baseline measures. In this case, maybe the ratio between the number of proposals presented and those accepted shows the difference between your best performers and everyone else. If so, plan to use this ratio to evaluate future results. Make sure you have several weeks or months (depending on your usual sales reporting period) of your baseline measurement available for comparison.

3.  Determine how you will monitor the training results. This includes how often and how well the employees use their new skills on the job. Improved results are great, but you want to show a direct link between the newly learned skills and the improved results.

4.  Make sure the training program provides the knowledge and skills needed for the selected behaviors. Within the training program, be sure to include written and performance tests of the new knowledge and skills. This completes the chain of evidence connecting your training to the improved business results.

5.  Collect your measures and communicate the results. If the training was well done and the selected behavioral measures show the new learning was put to use on the job, then you can make the case that the training contributed to the improved business results.

Getting useful measurements to evaluate training isn't very hard to do but it does take planning. I like to think of the benefits of evaluating training in this simple way: results only count when you count the results.

And you do want the training to count, don't you?

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