Measuring the effectiveness of your corporate training

Corporate training represents a substantial investment for organizations, both in terms of time and money. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the amount businesses were spending on upskilling their employees saw a slight decline, but in 2022, this trend strongly reversed with US-based businesses spending an average of over $1,200 on training programs. This is a serious investment that demands strong, measurable returns.

So, how can training providers prove the effectiveness of their training?

A common theory in learning science is the 70/20/10 model. This offers an explanation for how individuals acquire professional skills;

Training providers, such as Skill Dynamics, can use the data provided from this final 10% to measure the impact of a training program and demonstrate its direct results and effectiveness.

At the outset of any corporate training program, the initial critical step involves defining precise learning objectives that align with your organization’s goals. Of course, asking team members to self-identify any gaps in their knowledge can be challenging, but it can also be a helpful part of building an effective training program that meets their needs.

An alternative objective to this involves your team undertaking a skills gap assessment. This approach can help with identifying the roles in your team, and defining the target levels of proficiency for each learner, which ensures each of them will receive a completely personalized learning journey that is perfectly aligned with their review results, role, and the overall needs of your organization. This will identify exactly where upskilling opportunities exist, which helps to provide a clear framework for measuring each learner’s progress and, by extension, for evaluating the overall effectiveness of the corporate training program.

Once you have identified the KPIs for your training program, and each learner has received their personalized plan, it’s vital that learning content is continually reinforced. There are various evaluation methods that can be used to assess the effectiveness of corporate training programs. These can be implemented at each stage of the training process to ensure that each learner feels supported and to provide the training provider with the data they need to continuously optimize their program to meet each learner’s needs.

Initiating the process with a pre-training assessment is essential. It enables training providers to evaluate employees’ existing knowledge and pinpoint potential skill gaps even before the training commences.

While training is ongoing, learners should be regularly asked to share their feedback and respond to surveys. This continuous employee feedback can be used to build a bank of anecdotal evidence of the positive results of training and can highlight changes in behavior, and new ways of working. This anecdotal evidence can be extremely valuable, as evidenced by our partnership with Huber+Suhner – a world-leading manufacturer of electrical and optical connectivity components – where learners were emphatic in expressing the positive results of their training, with:

Alongside this informal feedback, learners should be provided with more formal reviews. These should always be data-driven, with any feedback being strongly based on results. We wrap this data pool together in our insight module, which provides our partners with the full picture of their teams’ performance. This data allows them to develop personal development plans for each learner, ensuring the ongoing relevance of their corporate training and demonstrating commitment to their continued upskilling.

Many businesses primarily focus on immediate training outcomes when assessing program success, overlooking the long-term benefits it can bring to their organization. Of course, high-quality corporate training programs will result in concrete improvements in team performance. Looking again at Skill Dynamics’ partnership with Ewellix, learners saw measurable improvements in their skill sets, with 36% reporting improvements in negotiation, 37% in strategy, and 28% in procurement.

Taking this approach discounts longer-term metrics such as employee retention, engagement, and promotion rates, which are hallmarks of a successful training program. After all, businesses in many specialist industries are having to tighten their belts, so being able to boost productivity and creativity while saving money should be a priority. A high-quality training provider will give you insights into these longer-term metrics, allowing you to see the full picture of what a strong training program can do for your business.

Skill Dynamics places great emphasis on data in our supply chain and procurement training programs. We understand the importance of offering in-depth insights into how training contributes to the growth and success of your teams. To support this, we offer a full range of training resources alongside our review module to help organizations determine the effectiveness of their corporate training programs and to ensure these programs are helping them achieve their goals.

If you’d like to find out how Skill Dynamics can build an effective training program to support your business, and how we measure this success, check out our insight module.