Erskin Cherry : Maintaining Excellence

Pickled prickly pears in jars

Prickly pears rot unless pickled or otherwise preserved. Your trainings can be rotten, too, but you'll need more than a sharp nose to know. –Erskin

In order to make sure the training you have is good both now and later, you need a way to measure the results and process to do something once you know what work and what doesn't.

Table of Contents

Measuring Effectiveness

There are two ways you should track your training success: what people say, and what they do. If people don't like the way you train, they will stop listening to your trainings. Even if they do listen, if they can't do what the training was supposed to teach them, you still need better training.

Surveys

Get direct feedback using surveys at the end of each training session. Include both quantitative questions and open-ended questions. That said, keep your survey easy to fill out. Provide everything needed to complete the survey. Online surveys are great if everyone has laptops or enough computers are available in the training location. If you use paper surveys, remember to bring pencils as well. Make sure your surveys have the topic and trainer filled out on them beforehand. Use this generic example as a starting point for the surveys for each of your training topics. Trainers should also provide feedback, either with the same or a different survey as those attending the training.

  1. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being Very Effective and 1 being Not Effective, how effective was your training today?
  2. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being Very Compelling and 1 being Not Compelling, how compelling was your trainer today?
  3. What did you like the most about this training?
  4. How could this training be improved?
  5. Do you have any other questions, comments, complaints, or concerns?

Starting using a survey now!

Icon

Google Forms make for an easy and fast way to get a survey going. While it doesn't make it easy to automatically fill in things like the training topic and trainer name, it's still enough that there's no reason to ever give training without a survey. Here's an example form you can copy.

 

Practicals

Test what people have learned through practical application. Do this a part of training itself. Academic schools do this after the training and call it testing. Technical schools call it certification. You will do it to make sure your training succeeded. The best way to do this will vary wildly depending on the training topic. Regardless, make sure you meet these requirements:

  1. Provide a practice environment that mimics the real world as much as possible.
    1. This can be done with virtual machines on a computer, role-play with other people, or any others means of simulation.
    2. If at all possible, make the practice environment available to everyone, all the time.
  2. For every person trained must prove through use that they learned the material presented in the training.
    1. For topics about performing a task or using a skill, have each person perform the task in a real or simulated environment.
    2. For topics about knowledge, have each person work through a situation, real or simulated, where the knowledge would be needed.
      1. Test of rote memorization are boring. Avoid them at all costs.
      2. Even an arbitrary scenario where the knowledge is used to accomplish an imaginary goal is more engaging than blindly repeating facts from memory.
    3. Frequently remind everyone, yourself included, that the only goal is to get everyone comfortable with the training topic. There is no failure, just someone who hasn't yet succeeded. Communicating this needs to be part of the process for doing practicals.
  3. Keep records not only of who attended the training, but of who successfully used what they learned in the practical.

Let's get meta

Icon

 You've almost read this whole guide. How do you think we might check that you understood it? Notice how this guide is full of numbered checklists? Those provide a list of things to check for someone reviewing a training presentation (and trainer). When creating training outlines, you'll need to create the practical as well. The more you can make the practical a part of the presentation itself, the less additional work you'll need to do.

Continuous Improvement

Feedback is useless unless you do something with it, and even a perfect training plan can become out of date over time as things change. Changes in your audience can also make otherwise great training less effective. Finally, feedback and improvement is for more than just your training plan, it's for you as a trainer as well.

  1. Establish a regularly recurring review of feedback both across all topics, for each topic in particular, and for each trainer in particular.
  2. Establish a regularly recurring review of training plans to ensure they are up to date on their topic.
    1. Where ever possible, any process which changes material the training covers should also update (or at least mark for future update) the associated training.
    2. Consider adding new topics, removing old topics, and combing or splitting topics if needed.
  3. Establish a regularly recurring review of who attends your training both across all topics and for each in particular.
    1. Pay attention to how changes in your audience can help you improve training.

Previously: Making Training Plans