[ad_1]
Technical authors who create training material will also have to spend some time creating materials to evaluate that training. The third level of assessing the effectiveness of your events is learning transfer. This follows the “happy sheet” (or feedback form) and “the test” (on the day measure of learning transfer). Here’s why and what to look for.
Why examine learning transfer?
Training is designed to achieve a business objective; it can be anything from learning to use a new HR system to becoming a better sales person. The first levels of evaluation don’t help examine fully whether you’ve met your objectives. The “happy sheet” tells you what the participants on your program thought of it, and the “test” tells you whether they understood your content and could use it on the day.
The trouble is that “on the day” often fails to translate into real life performance. Because of the practicalities of corporate life, it’s rare for someone to leave the learning environment and rush back into the workplace and put that material into practice. More likely there will be a break between the end of training and actually using the knowledge/skills gained.
Which means that all too often, people forget what they learned, or forget to even attempt to implement their new skill set at all. Therefore the investment in the training process is lost, or minimised without further support.
To determine whether your event was effective you need to measure how much of the learning has been put into practice.
What to look for?
A lot depends on the type of course you’ve delivered – for a computer skills course (for example), you should be able to glean plenty of information by examining the end product of user interactions, error logs, reports of problems from departments, etc.
In the case of a sales skills course, you’ll need to develop an observation document to demonstrate whether techniques are being put into practice on sales calls. And so on.
The important thing for the technical author is to arrive at a list of measurable criteria to determine whether the training was successful in meeting its learning objectives.
This stage of evaluation is of course part of a bigger process, even if your delegates have put their learning into play it doesn’t mean that the course has necessarily succeeded. But you can’t measure the success or failure of any learning event until you measure whether the knowledge or skills gained are being used.
If they’re not, don’t despair. You can support the material through coaching and management exercises in the workplace in addition to the event itself.
[ad_2]
Source