Training survey evaluation questions that are always needed
Building the best courses isn’t easy, and no training course is ever truly complete. There’s a lot that goes into course content research, and building out a good learning experience. The most important things instructional designers typically think about after a course is launched and delivered is:
Will the client be a returning customer? What parts need to be modified? And did the course satisfactorily achieve its objective?
Breaking down these questions in a meaningful way is why you need a post training survey evaluation, this can even be achieved after each test/quiz.
As an LMS provider we’ve worked with many companies to help them understand not just how to build out a good training survey, but also when to build out training survey questions. In order to ensure you’re evaluating training effectiveness properly, it's important to consider the types of questions that need to be asked. Let's take a deeper dive in the most important questions that are always needed:
1) Rating the presenter or rating the course
How engaging was the presenter?
How engaging was the course?
Whether the content is delivered by a person or as online content via tools like LMS (learning management system). It’s important to evaluate how engaging the content actually was. You can have great content that covers all the facts, but if the presenter or how the course is presented isn’t “lively” enough it may lose engagement. It’s important to remember this is a hard KPI to measure through regular reporting, and that’s why it's one of the most important open ended questions to ask.
2) What did you learn?
Was there anything new that you learned after completing these training sessions?
Course content needs to bring something new for the learner to demonstrate ROI (return on investment). Whether you’re training employees or a client, this is a key question to understand if you will be getting a return learner.
3) Customer satisfaction or net promoter score
How likely are you to recommend this training program to a friend or colleague?
You might have seen this question yourself after trying a new product or doing a training session yourself. Well there's a good reason it's such a common question, it measures how satisfied the learner is with the course. It’s a good idea to include some variation of it in your training evaluation survey.
4) Is this the content the learner was expecting?
Did the content measure up to what you were promised at signup?
It’s important to understand if the training and development you’re advertising matches what the learner will see in your course. As instructional developers, the last thing we want is a learner to feel like they’ve been misled on the content. Asking this question keeps you on the pulse of how learners view your online training or offline training.
5) Is the learning content usable?
How usable is the content you learned in this course session?
If the learner cannot use the content they learned in their work or day to day life, what value has it brought? This is an important question to ask in your feedback survey to measure the overall value of the course. If the learner feels that they gain insightful actionable content every time they attend one of your courses, the more likely they’re to return.
Other considerations
As you can see the above course evaluation questions are related around value. These are questions that are hard to measure from simple reporting and need a well thought out approach to how you approach the questions. We find the above questions when written in a similar format can lead to lower churn.. So what about the other questions you have written down? Are they just as important to ask the learner? Maybe, it’s important to keep each survey to 10 questions or less, overall engagement can drop on survey’s beyond this number of questions.
When and where should you survey?
If you have online training courses, it is possible to break out survey questions as the course progresses with the right LMS. However only a few LMS platforms have the ability to provide surveys directly within a course. Even in-person ILT (instructor led training) can be evaluated as the course progresses with an LMS. So when/where should you survey? If you don’t have a platform to manage it through course progression, then just add it to the end of the course. However if you do have an LMS that supports it, you can provide an analysis on each segment of your course session for more accurate results.
Training survey analytics and tracking
It can be difficult to keep track of all your training survey reports, if you’re in the market for an LMS consider taking a look at EduBrite. Our LMS platform has a variety of reports to suit your needs. If you find something missing just build your own custom report within the platform. You can also schedule reports to be sent out to select few or a group of users.
Take a look at some of our report examples below, feel free to reach out to us with any questions.