What Are the Best Training Evaluation Survey Questions to Ask?

A survey is one of the simplest and cost-effective ways to get feedback from learners. There are many ways to structure your survey, and you can use various types of questions based on the objectives of your post-training survey. You can read more about the types of training survey questions in this article.

While there are many types of survey questions, how you write your questions leads to an effective survey. Here are some of the best training evaluation survey questions to consider. To help you structure your survey and identify which ones are relevant for your evaluation survey, we’ve clustered them into different themes.

Pre-course related questions

Your post-training survey should look at pre-implementation and go beyond the actual course content and delivery. This allows you to get a glimpse of how learners are informed about the course – whether objectives are clearly defined and how expectations are built and managed. For example:

• How easily did you comprehend the course title and description? Rate from 1 to 7.
• Were training goals and objectives clearly defined before the course began?
• How would you rate the pre-training preparation and onboarding?
• What were your expectations for the course?
• Did the online training meet your expectations?
• What would be your recommendations for improving the pre-training phase?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) or learner satisfaction

NPS® – or Net Promoter Score – is a benchmark used to measure customer experience and loyalty. Find out how satisfied your learners are with the course materials and training program as a whole with the following questions:

• Would you recommend this training course to your co-workers?
• How likely are you to recommend this training course to your co-workers?

Course content

These are questions that will help you in creating and enhancing the course content for future training:

• How easy is it to understand the language of the course? Did you have to read any section again to comprehend it?
• How much of the reading materials were you able to finish?
• Were the reading materials interesting enough to read all the way through?
• How much of the videos were you able to watch all the way through?
• How long did you find each of the modules? (Too long, neither too long nor too short, too short)
• Rate how interesting the videos/audio materials were.
• Would you prefer all text content, or a combination of text, videos and audio?
• Was the course content in-depth and comprehensive enough?
• Were there any unnecessary content repetitions across different modules?

Quality

Quality is one of the key elements that would define training effectiveness. These questions uncover how your learners think about the quality of the instructor in addition to the course:

• Rate the overall quality of the training
• Rate the overall quality of the instructor
• Rate the following:
  • Instructor’s level of knowledge
  • How engaging the instructor was throughout the course
  • Speed of delivery
  • Instructor’s overall attitude and enthusiasm
• Was the quality of content consistent across various modules?
• Rate the overall engagement of the class/learning group

Course delivery

Course delivery is of utmost importance, especially for remote learning experiences. Without enough collaboration, interaction, and engaging activities, online training could feel too distant for learners. Ask these questions to find out how to improve the learning environment:

• Rate your overall learning experience
• (Check all that apply) Did you, at any point during the online training, feel:
  • Too isolated
  • Too distant
  • There’s too much interaction
  • Engaged just right
• How did you like the types of assessments used?
• How did you find the size of your class/training group?
• How was the tone of the course?
  • Did you find it engaging?
  • Did you find it monotone?
  • Did you feel it’s too automated or robotic?
• Rate how much more interaction would you prefer the course to have.

Course structure

Training effectiveness is comprised not only of great course content but also a structure that’s easy enough to follow. Here are some questions to find out whether the course structure is learner-friendly or confusing:

• Rate how easy it was to follow the course’s sequence and flow
• Is the difference between modules easy to understand?
• Were there clear separations between modules?

Impact and relevance of the course

These questions define how much and how well training participants learned:

• Did you find the course to be relevant to your role?
• Did you learn anything new?
• How much new information did you learn from the course?
• How practical are your learnings for your role?

Recommendations

And most importantly, don’t forget to ask an open-ended question to gather recommendations to improve this course.

• How would you improve this course?
• Do you have any recommendations for future training?

Conclusion

While this is a long list of evaluation questions, you don’t need to ask all of them. The key is to identify which are the important questions for your own effectiveness survey and include what you want to know most. Remember that an effective course evaluation should be relevant to your objectives, meet stakeholder expectations, and not too time-consuming.