ASSESSING TRAINING EFFECTIVENESS

Author: Amit Jadhav

Every organization requires the services of trained professionals for performing the activities in a systematic way to cope with the challenges and competitiveness in the dynamic and fluctuating world. Training is known as the organized procedure for increasing the knowledge and skills of an employee for doing a specified job and involves active participation by the employees. It is systematically provided to the employees for increasing productivity, improving quality. It helps a company fulfill its future personnel needs, improves organizational climate and helps in personal growth.

With the ushering in of Globalization and Liberalization since early 1990s, there has been a sea change in our business processes, and our corporate practices forcing organizations to mould themselves to the new era of competition, where they have to compete not at local or national level but at international level. This necessitates huge investments in the training programs for providing the requisite skill set to the staff.

The ultimate aim of any training program is to achieve:

• Continuous Improvement

• Change-in-Attitude

• Cost Saving

• Total Productivity

• Scope for development

                        When organization has invested in some training, how do we know if it has a success? Our gut feeling might be that skills and practice have improved. But in what ways and by how much has it improved, and did organization get value of money? Answers to these questions can be found by doing an evaluation.

Evaluation of training compares the post training results to the objectives expected by administrators, trainers and trainees. It helps in improving the training program, providing feedback to training planners, managers and participating employees. A popular framework for evaluation of training is known as Kirkpatrick’s model which has four basic steps in its execution namely reaction, learning, behaviour and outcome respectively.

Reaction:  Assess what the trainees thought of the particular program usually by use of a questionnaire.

Learning: Measures the learning principles, facts, skills and attitudes which were specified as training objectives.

Behaviour: Measures aspects of job performance which are related to training objectives.

Outcome: Relates to the result of the training program to organizational objectives and other criteria of effectiveness.

Observations: According to me Training and development is a very important part of the company’s objectives. It also helps the organisation in shaping the career of its employees; hence the organisation can plan the training programme in such a manner wherein, the importance of the programme is made clear at its very beginning. It should be composed in such a manner, such as the programme, not only give learning outcomes but is a knowledge process to the employees through methods which can be effective.  And to evaluate the outcomes of the training programme, Kirkpatrick’s model of evaluation can be implied. The implication should be done with following method. The methods can be utilized in following manner;

Reaction: The questionnaire that is built to assess the reaction should not be vague or biased. Before giving the questionnaire to the employees, the reason / motive / importance of the questionnaire has to be explained to them. Only then will an appropriate actual reaction can be seen.

Learning: The learning can also be measured after the training is completed and implemented. It needs to shown how much of the knowledge or the learning an employee uses in the actual job process.

Behaviour: To evaluate training’s effectiveness behavioral changes on the job is most important. It describes an approach whereby individuals can see how they have changed and quantify the amount of change.

Outcome: The result of the training program may not be observed with immediate effect. There are chances there is no significant effect of the trainee’s effort on their actual learning outcome achieved from the training course. Hence here the result may vary from person to person and an appropriate approach towards the outcome should be applied.

All this is possible only when the organizations evaluate the effectiveness of the existing training programs on performance improvement of the employees and thereafter make suitable changes in the training policy to bridge the performance gaps in the employees.