Post-Training Questionnaires -- What Are They Good For?

Most organizations (91%) evaluate their training programs with satisfaction surveys. Far fewer evaluate what trainees learned (54%) or how well their training transferred to their work (23%). Does this make sense? Are we training employees so that they can be satisfied, or so that they can learn how to do their jobs better?

One answer is that it is too hard or too expensive to assess how much people learned in the training. The argument then goes, “if they’re satisfied with the training, perhaps that means they learned something, and therefore we’ll be able to use satisfaction as a substitute for learning.”

But is that true? Sitzmann and her colleagues set out to find out the answers not only to these questions, but to other questions, like what characteristics of the trainee or the course will predict how the trainee rates the course?

The conducted a meta-analysis of 136 studies to address their dozen hypotheses about trainee reactions. Here is an all-too-brief assessment of their key findings:

• Trainees’ pretraining motivation are positively related to reactions

• Trainees’ agreeableness are positively related to reactions

• Trainees’ anxiety are negatively related to reactions
• ·The strongest predictors of trainee reactions have to do with the instructor and course design:
  • Instructor style (use of humor, providing and inviting feedback, addressing the students by name)
  • The extent to which trainees believe they have meaningful interactions with the instructor
• The extent to which trainees believe their organization and/or supervisor support their attendance at the training positively affects their reaction
• How a trainee rates the course will predict their motivational states after the training
• Trainee reactions tell us a little about how much the trainee learned right after the training, but virtually nothing about how much they learned that they’ll remember later
• Trainee post-training self-efficacy is far better at predicting long-term knowledge gains than trainee reaction
• The use of technology in instruction will help with declarative knowledge of the topic of the training, but not the procedural knowledge

So, what are the practical take-aways? Here is the one that matters most to me:

Post-training satisfaction surveys are good for telling you about how motivated employees are likely to be as a result of the training, but not about how much they learned. Organizations are much better off asking a trainee whether he/she feels confident about their ability to use what they learned in a training than how much the liked the training. Of course, if you really want to measure how effective at teaching the trainees your training is, measure their learning, not their satisfaction with the course.

From: Sitzmann, T., Brown, K. G., Casper, W. J., & Ely, K. (2008). A review and meta-analysis of the nomological network of trainee reactions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(2), 280-295.