Why you're not getting enough bang for your training buck

So you trained a bunch of people in your company but you don’t know whether it’s paying off. How can you find out?

That’s a question asked by Donald Kirkpatrick back in the 1950s. His Ph.D. thesis was on the topic of “training evaluation.” Kirkpatrick came up with a model that’s still widely used in the training field. He isolated four levels of evaluation:

• REACTION: What did participants think of the training?
• LEARNING: What did participants learn?
• BEHAVIOR: Are participants using the learning productively on the job?
• RESULTS: Did the training produce the desired result?

The American Society of Training and Development (ASTD) did a study to determine how frequently companies used each of these levels. Here’s the bad news:

• REACTION: 96%
• LEARNING: 37%
• BEHAVIOR: 13%
• RESULTS: 3%

Which means that, say, when an employee is sent to an off-site conference, 96% of the time a manager will ask, “Did you like the training?” Only 37% of the time will the manager ask “What did you learn?” And only 13% of the time will the boss actually determine whether the learning is being applied.

No surprise, companies almost never get the result they intended.

"Why 80% of Employee Training Doesn't Stick - And What You Can Do About It"

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. If managers provide follow up — if they INspect what they EXpect — they can achieve the results they’d hoped for.

Tagged as: Employee training, Training