Success control is an important topic for HR professionals and trainers, after all, your clients expect performance for their money. How can I provide my supervisors with evidence of the success of my training measures? Donald Kirkpatrick developed a 4-level model that helps you with this.

For companies, it is important to know that paid training really brings the desired effect. Ultimately, employees should develop relevant professional competencies, skills, and knowledge through these measures that provide long-term benefits to the company. As early as the late 1950s, economist Donald Kirkpatrick developed a corresponding evaluation model to measure training programs to demonstrate their benefits.

This model can be applied to various training measures: Especially for predominantly digital training, you, as the person responsible, need to know the value of training and communicate it clearly. We show you which four stages you should consider when measuring the success of your training measures:

Start now with your own learning platform!

Try blink.it for 30 days with all features for FREE. Just click on the image - let's go!

An Overview of the Kirkpatrick Model

The Four Stages of Success Control in the Kirkpatrick Model

According to Kirkpatrick, you start creating your model at the last stage – the results. After all, what interests companies most are the objectives achieved. From there, you work your way back to the participants. You should ask yourself the following questions based on the new Kirkpatrick model at the respective stages:

4. Results: What benefit does your client or your company gain?

At the top of the success measurement is the business success of your client. At the results stage, you are asked to what extent the intended outcomes of the training were achieved. And how these contribute to the company’s goals. The benefit for the entire company is the focus here, not the development of an individual participant.

The goal does not always have to be fully met. Even small developments and impulses from employees towards the company’s goals are decisive. After all, it can already be a significant success when employee behaviors develop in the right direction, enabling long-term objectives to be reached.

3. Behavior: What learnings do your participants implement in their daily work?

This stage looks at how participants of your training ultimately implement what they have learned in the workplace. The question arises whether your participants' behavior changed after the training.

Factors that lead to a change in behavior also play an important role. These should, of course, be strengthened, so that participants are able to implement what they have learned in the long term in their daily work. Ideally, you, as the training manager, conduct discussions with participants and supervisors to highlight these factors and the associated changes.

2. Learning: What have your participants learned in the training?

The learning process is examined at the second level. It is asked whether the knowledge, skills, and abilities of your participants have improved.

Not only the competencies acquired by your participants are considered, but also small progress is decisive. Ultimately, it matters that your participants integrate the new knowledge into their daily work and strive to implement it. Changes can also show through a higher commitment to the employer, benefiting the company as well.

1. Reaction: How did the training appeal to your participants?

At the reaction stage, participants are asked how they felt about your training. Not only substantive topics such as methodological variety, completeness of the training, or relevance of the topic are considered. The framework conditions also play an important role in the satisfaction with your measure.

If participants are dissatisfied, learning motivation decreases, and so does your training success. So you see how your methods and measures are received by the participants. Ask them directly what they like or dislike, and use this input for the next training session.

The four stages according to Kirkpatrick help you align the successes and learning progress of the participants with business goals. At the same time, you receive direct feedback on the benefits of your measure. Additionally, the feedback from your participants shows you directly where improvement is needed and allows you to derive your own benefits from it. The model is just one of many ways to measure the success of training and to improve it in the long term.

Here on the blog, you will find many more tips that will make planning future measures easier for you. To not miss any articles, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter for free and receive the latest articles directly via email.

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Don’t miss any more articles on this blog and receive the latest posts weekly conveniently via email. Just enter your email address in this field!