Training Reflection

Good Experience

When I hired on with Knife River Construction company, right off the bat I had to participate in a multitude of on boarding trainings. All of these trainings were about safety and integrity throughout the company and how they apply into your everyday work life. These trainings were informative and concentrated on keeping the employees engaged thought the whole exercise, asking questions and allowing the employees to engage in the training. I didn’t know it at the time but my safety training officer was implementing the Kirkpatricks levels of training and evaluation. As stated in Professor Swifts “Evaluating Training Effectiveness” lecture the four key indicators of assessing training is to understand the reaction of the persons in the training where she included a series of questionnaires within the training, first being an assessment of how we liked the training, second leading to there trainer evaluating our retention of the information which a short quiz. After the training was all said and done I would notice my safety training officer out on the job when we were doing confined space work and trench work to see how well we are applying the training into our every day lives. These training techniques show the trainer true results and shows the trainees that the trainer truly cares about the well being and retention of the information being presented within the training exercises. As Knife River has such a strong training program it has shown me how much other facilities are lacking in training throughout their work force.

Bad Experience

Throughout my career at Knife River I have been sent to facilities around the state like Trimble technology and Top Con survey for a series of informative lectures leaning the material. I have found these trainings to be somewhat informative although the structure of these trainings has not felt effective with my learning style. The instructors have failed to ask questions and keep the trainees engaged, in tandem with having an unengaged audience, these two courses didn’t offer any feedback forms that we could give input for future trainings. Even though I went to these trainings and retained a lot of the information I found it hard to reach out to the trainer for assistance after the class for instruction on training material . Even if these trainings would offer post training videos after the main training course this would be ver beneficial for those attending the trainings.

In conclusion, I found the results from using Kirkpatricks levels of training much more effective in the work environment, giving the trainee feedback on the training material along with giving the trainer results on how well they have performed the training.

Citations:

• Michele Swift, Lecture 2: Evaluating Training Effectiveness