Track your spending and its returns
One place to start is looking at the training or education you’ve done in years past. Did you see results that directly improved your bottom line? If not, look closely at what you’ve spent money on. Maybe you’re paying for employees to get advanced degrees that are useless to your company or maybe you lack the resources needed for your staff members to fully implement what they learned in training.
There are multiple ways to track training, the most popular being pretesting and post-testing to grasp the change in employee knowledge. Whether or not you measured your employees’ change in skills, a follow-up assessment to gauge retention and whether more training is needed can provide positive feedback. Questions to think about are: Did they learn something from the training? If they learned something, can they apply it on the job? If they can apply what they learned on the job, did it have a positive financial effect on the company?
“The assessment on the front and the back sides is an absolute must to create metrics, versus just doing box checking: team-building, check; diversity, check,” says Jim Potantus, vice president of Corporate College, a division of Cuyahoga Community College. “It’s really finding what those long-term deliverables can be in regards to ROI.”
If you haven’t seen the results you were hoping for, don’t continue to throw the same training program at the problem and hope for a different outcome. It’s important to remember that training isn’t always the solution and that people learn in different ways. The best thing to do is either sit down with a training provider or internally spend time evaluating the best solutions moving forward.
