Lots of senior managers look for attendance data (number trained) – but this is a big mistake.
It rests on a faulty assumption.
Lots of people assume that exposure to information creates knowledge, and that knowledge creates new behaviours. If you say it as bluntly as this, you can see it’s not true. But we still act like it is.
It’s a real shame, but you can’t just open the top of someone’s head and pour knowledge inside.
Being at a training course for a certain amount of time does not pour a certain amount of knowledge into a learner. Learning is much more complicated than that. There are lots of elements that influence how much you will remember from a programme, and often it will be next to nothing.
Presence is not a good indicator of anything when it comes to learning.
Another common idea is to look at what the learners thought about a course. Did they like it? Do they say it was helpful or interesting?
But how much people liked courses also tells you next to nothing.
This is the kind of information most course evaluation forms collect. The problem is that there is not a strong link between liking a course and learning a lot. We are bad judges of how we learn.
Some unenjoyable experiences can be the ones we learn the most from.
Practicing inputting data into a spreadsheet quickly, or summing dozens of columns of test data. Going through three or five or ten revisions of indicators for a sample project. These are not fun – but you are likely to learn something.
Yes, too many courses are unenjoyable because they’re boring.
And I agree – most of them are the wrong sort of boring. It might be boring to practice the piano for an hour – but you will get better at playing. It’s also boring to hear someone drone on about proper finger pressure on piano keys for an hour – but you won’t get any better at the piano.
But it still doesn’t mean that enjoying the course is the same as learning.
You need other ways to try and understand whether the learning projects are doing what they should. But what?
The absolute best thing to do doesn’t need you to collect any new information at all.
Instead, your team tightly aligns the training design to the problem you’re trying to fix. If your procurement training is well designed, and you wanted to decrease the time between a request being made and the item reaching its destination, then you just see whether that time decreases. It’s hard to design training like this, though – you can’t just ask Alan from procurement to read out some PowerPoint slides.
That’s where an alternative comes in.
Use course evaluations to collect information on whether the course used the approaches that help people learn and remember. Did it focus on practicing real-life skills? Did it return to the same topic several times, in different ways, and mix it up with other topics? And so on.
Ask your team to show you data on whether learners said they were practicing the real skills they will use on the job.
If the answer’s yes, there’s a good chance your team are going the right way. And if it’s no, get them to do some research on what good learning looks like.
