Training is over – what now? When it comes to the long-term effect of continuing education, many trainers can only speculate. With a subsequent online phase, you not only achieve greater training transfer, but you can also concretely measure how successful your participants are.

The Idea: Making Trainings Measurably Sustainable

The benefit of your continuing education largely depends on the actual success of your participant. How much of the learned content do they still remember two, four, or twelve weeks after the last training? And how well can they implement the acquired knowledge in their daily life?

This information is not only important for you personally, but of course also a strong argument for your customers. This way, you can provide not only your current customers (possibly anonymized) evaluations, but you also have proof for future sales negotiations that your training is sustainable.

But beware: Only those who are clear about specific goals in advance can later measure them for success. In professional terminology, the term “Educational Controlling” is often used here, which encompasses not only the control of educational projects but also planning and coordination based on predetermined criteria.

Your Customer's Perspective: A Return on Investment

“If I send my employees to expensive seminars, I want to see a clear result!”

You have probably heard a similar statement from potential customers. Some companies have very specific ideas about the goals of the training. After all, they invest in further education to achieve noticeable improvements in their employees. Their “Return on Investment” (ROI) is best reflected in results that are measurable.

In other companies, however, no concrete goals are formulated and communicated – which does not mean that they are not present! Especially with goals that are unspoken in the mind of your client, misunderstandings and dissatisfaction can occur on all sides.

Therefore, it is best to discuss the formulation of goals with your client as early as possible and inform them about your methods for measuring them. This creates trust, transparency, and the good feeling that they will receive a corresponding result for their investment.

If you want to learn more about determining ROI, I recommend the career guide “Measuring the Success of Seminars and Trainings – Return on Investment for Educational Investments” from the Swiss educational portal www.ausbildung-weiterbildung.ch.

The Tool: Blended Learning

How do you implement measures that deliver measurable results? In classic face-to-face training, there is often not enough time for corresponding methods – and individual work in the form of questionnaires is a waste of resources in this context.

With the Blended Learning concept, you expand your classic training with online support in the form of a digital platform. There, you create explanatory videos, exercises, and much more in advance and usually allow your participants to work with them self-directedly either right before and/or immediately after the face-to-face phase.

There are many good arguments for Blended Learning – for example, the creation of a new revenue stream. Another great advantage is the transparency of training success and the generation of measurable ROI for your client.

These are the 7 Biggest Advantages for Trainers with Blended Learning:

• You gain measurability

• You gain flexibility

• You gain a unique selling proposition

• You gain a new revenue stream

• You gain reusability

• You gain new customer groups

• You gain media diversity

The Application: How to Achieve Meaningful Measurements

On a suitable digital platform, many options are available to make your training measurable. I will introduce you to the three most popular methods below. In all measures, you should keep in mind that

• they should fit into the overall training concept,

• the execution should last a maximum of ten minutes (participants are more likely to invest three times ten minutes than once thirty minutes)

• and that an easy anonymization should be possible when shared.

Surveys

The classic method of success measurement is a survey (“Happy Sheet”) after the training. This is definitely a measure that you can easily integrate into your Blended Learning with little effort. However, simply asking your participants if they have internalized what they learned yields little meaningfulness. This personal assessment is very subjective and superficial.

Surveys that ask for concrete examples are better: Have your participant describe a situation where they recently encountered your training content. This requires a bit more time for processing but is usually much more informative.

Exercises

With Blended Learning, you can go far beyond simple text surveys. You could theoretically also send these via email. Take advantage of your online support by incorporating exercises that your participant should complete during the face-to-face phase. With appropriate software, you can then view results and keep track of your participant's progress.

Tip: A few weeks after the last face-to-face event, incorporate an exercise into your online support that is similarly structured to an exercise during your face-to-face phase. This creates a direct comparison and helps you assess how successful your training was for individual participants.

Calls to Action

This method only generates indirect measurability, but it is important at every point in your training. Therefore, not only specific exercises should include a call to action for your participant, but also explanatory videos or background materials, for example. Your participant should always know what they need to do, when, and how.

The success of calls to action is therefore indirectly measurable, because you generate active results with the participant: For example, you can prompt them to discuss in the comment field. Even weeks after the call to action, the discussion can still be viewed.

Involvement of the Supervisor

A clever measure that motivates your participants and satisfies your client as well: Give a supervising person access to your online support in company-internal training. Introduce them to your platform and show them how you measure the success of your participants.

Tip: Also ask the supervisor to explain to you in 90 seconds why the training is important for their employees. You can record this short speech and incorporate it into your Blended Learning, ideally at the beginning of the online phase. Simply make use of our blink.it kit and check out our Tips & Tricks for studio@home!

In an expert article by INtem, involving the supervisor is mentioned as a crucial success factor. The method discussed there aims at the supervisor as a co-trainer, “who accompanies the implementation of the learning content in everyday work.” This is certainly an effective method, but it also costs the supervisor a lot of time. With Blended Learning, the investment is much lower and more effective, as all content and results are accessible to all stakeholders at any time and from any place.

How Measurability Works with blink.it

With the blink.it web app, you can easily create surveys, tests, or quiz questions. This way, you can check your participants’ knowledge at different stages of learning. You can then export the answers as a table (CVS or XLSX Excel). Alternatively, you can also see in each interaction which participants have submitted which answers.