Training

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?

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

Today I feel like summarizing some of the more interesting research out of the current issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology (“JAP”) (Volume 93, Number 1, January 2008). I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. First, I’m not always as disciplined as my mentor, Dr. Richard Klimoski, might have hoped in keeping up with the latest research and industrial organizational psychology. This little exercise, if done regularly, might not only help me to show some more of that discipline but also bring to light some interesting things about organizations that might not be widely known. Frankly, I’ve not seen JAP on the bookshelves of very many of my friends and colleagues, which would suggest that some of the cool things I find in there may not be common knowledge.

Today I feel like summarizing some of the more interesting research out of the current issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology (“JAP”) (Volume 93, Number 1, January 2008). I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. First, I’m not always as disciplined as my mentor, Dr. Richard Klimoski, might have hoped in keeping up with the latest research and industrial organizational psychology. This little exercise, if done regularly, might not only help me to show some more of that discipline but also bring to light some interesting things about organizations that might not be widely known. Frankly, I’ve not seen JAP on the bookshelves of very many of my friends and colleagues, which would suggest that some of the cool things I find in there may not be common knowledge.