Why waste time/money on staff training if you don’t know what, if anything, your staff are learning?
Investing time and effort in training employees (or volunteers/partners) and then never verifying how much they actually learned is short-sighted, penny-wise and pound foolish (a.k.a stupid).
Certainly, everyone takes it for granted that certifications have a test associated with them. First Aid, Lifeguarding, WMIS, CPA and driver’s licenses all require testing to confirm that a minimum level of knowledge has been gained from the training before receiving the certification.
Why is that? The obvious reason is that the information is important. We expect participants to remember most of that knowledge and be able to use it later. The test at the end of the course is a confirmation of that.
Inexplicably, that is not the way that most …show more content…
On the contrary, to see if your training is meeting your expectations, you need to periodically test a broad spectrum of what your employees should know - H&S, HR, customer service, various emergency protocols, etc.
Let’s call it a knowledge audit. A lot of otherwise reasonable senior managers, who insist on measuring everything else in their operations, will probably object to this advice. Their reasons for not testing will include time, expense, lack of appropriate staff and not wanting to upset the work units.
To me that means that they are quite satisfied with the training effort but really don’t care about the results. I don’t see the logic in that. It’s like tracking the number of sales calls but not the number of resulting sales. It makes no sense.
In an age of sophisticated metrics, it seems absurd that we don’t benchmark the level of operationally specific knowledge in our workforce. Is there any other part of our businesses that we pour money and time into without using any type of analytics to measures our successes (or
Investing time and effort in training employees (or volunteers/partners) and then never verifying how much they actually learned is short-sighted, penny-wise and pound foolish (a.k.a stupid).
Certainly, everyone takes it for granted that certifications have a test associated with them. First Aid, Lifeguarding, WMIS, CPA and driver’s licenses all require testing to confirm that a minimum level of knowledge has been gained from the training before receiving the certification.
Why is that? The obvious reason is that the information is important. We expect participants to remember most of that knowledge and be able to use it later. The test at the end of the course is a confirmation of that.
Inexplicably, that is not the way that most …show more content…
On the contrary, to see if your training is meeting your expectations, you need to periodically test a broad spectrum of what your employees should know - H&S, HR, customer service, various emergency protocols, etc.
Let’s call it a knowledge audit. A lot of otherwise reasonable senior managers, who insist on measuring everything else in their operations, will probably object to this advice. Their reasons for not testing will include time, expense, lack of appropriate staff and not wanting to upset the work units.
To me that means that they are quite satisfied with the training effort but really don’t care about the results. I don’t see the logic in that. It’s like tracking the number of sales calls but not the number of resulting sales. It makes no sense.
In an age of sophisticated metrics, it seems absurd that we don’t benchmark the level of operationally specific knowledge in our workforce. Is there any other part of our businesses that we pour money and time into without using any type of analytics to measures our successes (or