Trainings – Beneficial, or a Waste of Resources?

Have you ever been to a training that was beneficial to you? How about one that was a waste of time and resources? I, much like you I assume, have been to both. So how do you ensure your company’s trainings are beneficial to your staff? There are two key points we use to evaluate training: reliability and validity. Reliability is about the ability of your training to produce consistent results. Validity, on the other hand, is about the effectiveness of those results.

I once had a training in a nursing program that taught an outdated standard of care for the patients, and required nursing students to demonstrate that standard to pass. Was that training reliable? Sure it was, it ensured every student would use the same standard. However, it was not valid, because the standard was not correct, and could not be used outside this training.

In the opposite direction, I once attended a reliable and valid training on the employee view of an online scheduling app. This training took us through the experience of an employee viewing their schedule, and allowed schedulers to better understand why each of their job duties is essential to the employee experience.

In order to engage our employees and create reliable and valid trainings, we must evaluate our training and make necessary improvements. To evaluate our training program, we will move through four levels, known as Kirkpatrick’s Levels. The first is reaction, or the thoughts of the attendees after the training. The second is learning, or what the attendees learned from the training. The third is performance, or the implementation of that learning. Lastly, the fourth is results, or the outcomes of the training on the company as a whole (Connecticut.gov, 2016). Using these tools and drawing on our past experiences both attending and hosting trainings, we can create a training regimen that is both reliable and valid.

References:

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation in Detail. (2016) Connecticut.gov. https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/ctdn/ttt14m5handouts2pdf.pdf