Evaluate Business Performance Through Knowledge and Training Skills

Evaluate Business Performance Through Knowledge and Training Skills

When any business has invested in some training, how we would know if it has been a success? This article explains the way to evaluate any business performance involved in training.


I would summarize the basic questions for this article in the following How’s!

• How to identify training gaps and future training needs?
• How to inform future training plans and strategy?
• How to ensure training continuously improves?

Answering these questions will guide us to the right path to evaluate any business performance involve in training. The main process to deal with efficiency in training is to make sure the business reach three points:

• The efficiency of a particular process
• The number of returning customers
• Staff motivation

Measuring the efficiency of training skills is very simple by evaluating the reaction of the provided training method, by asking: What are the participants’ feedbacks on the training? This is typically measured through a survey and usually covers such items as program methodology, group and individual exercises, quality of materials and media, facilitator capabilities, facilities, etc.

This will drive us to the process of collecting; analyzing and reporting information to assist us understanding how much participants learned and applied what they have learned in the learning environment. Measure these results at the group level by summing monitoring results up to the group level we will be able to better determine if the overall training is the issue versus individual ability.

Unfortunately, so many organizations do not measure training effectiveness. Training evaluation is always a challenging area, especially when training new recruits because it is necessary to have a clear understanding of their baseline before the training starts; otherwise we can not be sure how far they have progressed as a result of their participation in training and these facts face those who deal in training through business side. In my opinion before we go for measuring and monitoring the efficiency, we need to decide which training programs we are going to measure and consider?

It may be that we want to check that a training program is meeting its objectives, or identify how a training program can be further improved. Deciding this should help us consider which information we need to collect and how we will collect it.

For second part in evaluation, we need to make sure that our evaluation methods are appropriate to the training program we are measuring and to our time and budgetary constraints. Organizations typically use such things as observation in the workplace, surveys or questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, performance monitoring and collection of financial data.

Last part in evaluation training program is the timing of evaluation. Timing is also key - best practice suggests that a two-part approach should be taken. In the first place, trainees' reactions and learning during the training program should be considered. Secondly, we should take into account how training is applied in the job and what the benefits are afterwards.