Measuring the success of employee training: Three questions for HR professionals

February 7, 2024

Measuring the success of employee training: Three questions for HR professionals

Training transfer

Company

After every employee training, the critical question arises: “Was the measure successful?” – Answering this question regularly poses challenges for HR managers. Three key questions will help you measure the success of trainings in the future.

Whether soft skills, digital competencies, or professional expertise: knowledge is the most important resource for successful companies. However, measuring the success of employee training is not an easy task. Often, you can't simply quantify the results of a training: How do you measure higher motivation, better communication, or subtle behavioral changes in your employees? I think you're familiar with the problem.

Various tools can help you measure the success of your employee training: questionnaires, tests, and individual interviews are just a few examples. The art is to use these tools purposefully – and at the same time, to ask the right questions for yourself, the employees, and your company.

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Three Questions

The following three key questions will help you measure the success of employee training more easily in the future:

Are the employees learning the right things?
Are there positive effects from the learning in the daily work life?
What measurable impacts does this training have?

Below, I will explain why these three questions are so important – and which tools you can use to answer them.

Measure everything that can be measured, and make everything measurable that cannot be measured. (Archimedes)

Question 1: Are employees learning the right things in training?

What should employees learn at all? The answer is often “Everything that is explained in the training.” However, this is far too vague and therefore difficult to measure.

A classic knowledge test on the last day of training only provides insights about the short-term memory of your employees. You learn nothing about which content will really be applied in the long term. In the worst-case scenario, only the nice trainer is remembered, or the good lunch – and the valuable tips for more productive work are quickly forgotten.

An Happy Sheet also cannot answer this question. Of course, it is desirable for employees to find the training valuable or motivating. This emotional snapshot, however, is no guarantee for a long-term change.

Suitable Tools:

To measure the content success of training, a long-term assessment of what has been learned is necessary. Especially, behavioral changes in your employees often only become evident weeks or even months later. To really see changes, a three-step approach has proven effective:

1. Assessment of the current state before the employee training:

What? – Current knowledge of the employees and expectations for the training
How? – Through questionnaires and surveys

2. Assessment of the learning status immediately after the employee training:

What? – Important core content and meeting the expectations
How? – Through knowledge tests, certificates, and HappySheets

3. Assessment of the changes in the workplace:

What? – Practical application and internalization of the core content
How? – Through questionnaires, observations, and employee interviews
Tip: Creating questionnaires is not that easy! In our article series “Asking the Right Questions,” you can learn how to use the right question types and phrasing to get the answers you need.

This three-step approach is particularly effective in e-learnings: You can directly integrate questionnaires and certificates into the training processes using a good tool and evaluate them online immediately – clearly and without paper chaos.

Question 2: Are there positive effects from learning in daily work life?

This question may sound superficial in the context of employee training. After all, employees should primarily acquire and implement knowledge. And that alone should already have a positive effect in daily work life.

What many HR professionals overlook: employees often provide much more direct feedback to training through their behavior. The success of training is often not only visible in individual employees. It becomes evident in the whole team, in daily collaboration, and ultimately in the work atmosphere. And we all know: A good work atmosphere is crucial for corporate success!

Some examples of how training effects can practically manifest in employees' daily lives:

Is the mood in the office better after a communication training?
Are there fewer complaints from subordinate employees after a leadership training?
Are employees completing certain tasks faster after a time management training?
Are employees less frequently ill after a training about health in the workplace?

Suitable Tools:

Which tools are suitable for measuring the success of the training largely depends on the subject of the training. The following tools are recommended for the examples mentioned above:

Observations or regular surveys about the work atmosphere
Individual or team conversations with direct feedback
Measurement of work speed on training-related tasks
Analysis of sick days or surveys about individual well-being

This way, you can measure the success of employee training in relation to daily work life across various factors. These factors are also important for the third question:

Question 3: What measurable impacts does the employee training have?

The third question is probably the most important one. It concerns the direct return on investment (ROI) for the entire company, namely: hard facts.

Many HR professionals tend to avoid metrics related to training as much as possible – after all, no one likes to hear that their work may have no effect. A clear statement based on numbers about whether this particular training is worth the investment is still essential. And ultimately, metrics also help you evaluate new employee training or improve existing measures.

To avoid misunderstandings: The effects on individual employees and smaller groups are also measurable (see Question 1 and Question 2). These measurements often refer to specifically designed questionnaires or self-assessments. When focusing on the entire company, the successes are measured using company-wide metrics.

Suitable Tools for Employee Training:

The success of training is measured using general metrics that relate to the success of the entire company. How and where these are measured differs in each company.

The following metrics may be helpful for you:

Productivity: for example, measured by newly acquired customers or produced goods
Cost savings: for example, measured by employee downtime or error rates
Customer satisfaction: for example, measured by processing times or direct customer surveys
Employee retention: for example, measured by the turnover rate

Hard metrics like these are especially important in the negotiation of training budgets – however, they should not be used as the sole criterion when training employees. Because often the connection between training and metric is not straightforward.

Conclusion: Measure training success on different levels

All three levels are important for measuring the success of employee training: the individual employee, departments or teams, and the entire company. Therefore, it is important to consider all three levels when asking the question “Was this training successful?” – for example, using the three questions presented above. Ultimately, it’s the task of a good HR developer to answer all three key questions using the appropriate tools.