If you have been involved in training or are in charge of staff such as the HR department of organisations, you would undoubtedly be interested to know the effect of training that your delegates or staff receive. The fundamental question is how to measure the effectiveness of your training and use that to design your train the trainer programs. Indeed, this has been such an important question that it is now a highly researched area within the training industry. This article explores the developments in this area and expands on established methodologies.

Measuring the effectiveness of training is directly related to ROI or Return on Investment. In other words, the best way to look at an activity such as training is to directly measure the bottom line. Providing training to staff costs and no HR department is ready to go through that cost without knowing what it will bring back. Naturally, measuring ROI has become an obsession of the industry. This is simply because there is no obvious and easy way to measure people’s performance.

Measuring ROI is easy when quantifiable skills are measured. For example, HR can easily calculate the need for the required number of staff who should know a particular programming language. HR can then send these staff to get trained on the required skill and later measure the results by seeing how many hours these programmers used the language when participating in various projects and successful they were.

However, this particular analysis gets a lot more complicated when you want to measure the performance improvement of an employee who has been sent to a soft skills training course. Consider assertiveness skills, negotiation skills, communication skills, handling difficult people, telephone skills, emotional intelligence and so on. These kinds of courses will help staff to become better at what they do in general as part of their job and so measuring the benefit to them or to the company is more qualitative than quantitative. This is the primary reason why there is still ongoing research in this area and many are chasing the holy grail of training performance measurement. Any break through here can significantly help us to design better train the trainer courses or training interventions.

Historically, modern training evaluation theories go back to Donald L. Kirkpatrick who developed a model in the 50s which now has become an industry standard to measure training effectiveness.

Kirkpatrick designed his model based on four distinct levels which measure various aspects of a training intervention:

• Reaction. This is the reaction of students to the training delivered to them.
• Learning. This is the evaluation of the increase of learning as a result of attending the training.
• Behaviour. This measures the extent of capability improvement on the job.
• Results. This measures how the organisation benefited from this training intervention. Some suggest that this also captures the ROI as well.

As you can see, this model systematically measures various aspects of training and intends to categorise and quantify the process so HR departments can better measure the effectiveness of their training and decide wisely for future training requirements.

The difficulty level on implementation of evaluation systems on these four levels is varied. Some are easy to implement and some are not so straight forward. The following is a general guideline:

• Reaction. Forms can be provided to collect student inputs. They can also be asked or interviewed on what they thought of the training. This is usually easy to implement.
• Learning. A system can be setup to measure the skill level of students before and after the training usually using a simple questionnaire. This is also usually easy to implement.
• Behaviour. This requires more in depth review than just a simple one-off observation or questionnaire. Line managers’ observation is required as well as feedback from co-workers to properly evaluate the post-training performance and possibly compare it with pre-training performance. In the case of soft skills training, this is mainly a qualitative approach.
• Results. This is perhaps the most difficult part as it is necessary to measure the performance improvement across the entire organisation. In addition, the effect of training must be isolated from all other factors affecting a business over a period of time where training has taken place.

Considering that the bottom line and ROI seem to be key performance indicators for HR department and generally for top management of any organisation and also the fact that the results dimension is the most difficult to measure, you can imagine why this area is both challenging and exciting for researchers.

Since Kirkpatrick’s model, researchers have proposed numerous models with various complexities. What is clear though is that training should also be carried out systematically as a way to enhance individual’s skills and not as a reaction to failures. If an employee fails due to lack of skills, the company has already paid the cost and sending the employee to a training program is much like a cure taking place after the disease has spread which is expensive and risky. The best approach is always prevention, which means organisations will significantly benefit from systematic ongoing soft skills training of their staff to prepare them for the competitive world of tomorrow. Those who don’t will find it progressively difficult to compete with those who do.