How do you measure the impact of your training and development programs?

As a professional in the training and development field, measuring the impact of your programs is crucial. It's like scoring a touchdown or a home run - without knowing the score, there's no way to know if you're winning. So, how do you measure the effectiveness of your programs? Well, it's not just about counting how many people attended or tracking their completion rates. You need to delve deeper and measure the behavioral changes that occur as a result of your training. It's not always easy, but with a strategic approach and a little dose of wit, you can gather the data you need to prove that your training rocks!

Tie to Performance Appraisal Metrics. Since employee appraisals often have common competencies that are scored across all employees, they can provide a way to quantify a "before versus after" impact of training. Identify the competencies that a training is aimed at improving. Gather and compare the before versus after scores on those competencies for training attendees. Compare the change in scores to a similar set of employees that have not had the training (i.e., your "control" in the experiment.) If you have had enough employees go through the training, the comparison can be a solid way to show results on competencies that matter.

I would say that defining objectives is crucial in measuring the impact of training programs. Organizations need to set specific and measurable objectives that align with their overall business strategy and vision. These objectives serve as a guide for designing training and development programs that meet specific needs and address performance gaps. Once objectives are set, the next step is to develop evaluation criteria and indicators. These should be aligned with the objectives and should be measurable to determine the effectiveness of the training program. For example, if the objective is to improve sales performance, indicators may include an increase in revenue or a decrease in the time it takes to close deals.

Identify any potential for A/B testing. For example, one Chief Learning Officer told me how his company decided to invest in training their call center employees in new soft skills like showing empathy and de-escalating emotional conversations. In the roll out, the CLO held off training one call center to be the control in the experiment they could use to isolate the effects of the training. After the training was delivered, they tracked changes in key metrics like customer satisfaction, retention rates, and employee turnover at each of the call centers. Because they kept one call center out as the control in the experiment, and isolated changes to just training, they were able to claim the improvement in metrics was due to the training.

It's vital to analyse the data, because many feedback forms do not identify the main point of the training program, which should be to in some way change and improve the behaviour and actions of the delegates, so things get progressively batter as time goes by. How a person feels about their learning is important, but the end result has to be some form of progression, not just adequate knowledge to perform the role asked of them.

Identify the training cost per person and the average annual compensation per person trained. Express the cost of the training as a percentage of their compensation. For example, if a training costs $1,000 per student and the average annual compensation of students is $50,000, that means the training represents two percent of their annual cost. That two percent becomes the one-year "break-even" point for the training investment. That means that if it sounds reasonable that the training will make the students at least two percent better at their job on average, the training is a positive investment - in just one year. Any improvement in subsequent years after that is additional return on that investment.