Training is such an important area in an organization importance of which can not be denied by any means. A company can lose its track to mere survival if it fails to recognize this critical domain. It is essential for more than one reason. Driving force behind training needs may be customers whose needs are changing with each passing day and companies have to learn new methods and ways to retain existing customers and attract new customers. It may be some technology that is going to replace the existing one and needs employees to learn new skills. Adding a new line of business may also be one of the reasons for companies who adopt training as a means to improve and expand. As a matter of fact no organization can progress without constantly grooming its work force for new skills and expertise. The very need for training is well demonstrated by the fact that employees these days wish to work with those companies they can grow with.
However, training process encompasses several issues that a company should pay proper attention to else it may affect the current state of affairs to adverse level by wasting company’s investment in terms of finances and time (and time is also money). A company should be well aware of the specific area in which the employees need training. The training sessions should be well organized and planned so as to reap maximum benefits from these sessions. Then there is issue of training of newly employed work force and company’s existing employees separately.
What are the minimum requirements for an employee to participate in the training session which is going to be held for building specific expertise is also an important issue. All these factors emphasize the need of evaluating training sessions and point to such an organized system that not only identify the key performance indicators but also measure these as the training session proceeds. Training evaluation metrics are a great tool in this regard that makes it very easy for the company to measure various aspects of training. These metrics help an organization to evaluate pre training and post training performance of the employees; how training is expected to increase the productivity of work force and how it increases the productivity in actual, what are the possible reasons for any gap between the expected and actual performance, where the fault lies; whether it is the absence of pre requisite skills from employees side or the trainer is responsible for poor performance of employees.
Training evaluation metrics allow the organization to set quantifiable goals against each measure and overall performance and the most important thing is that these do not let the organization lose its track by aligning these goals with organizational goals. A training session if evaluated using training evaluation metrics can prove to be highly beneficial to the organization by highlighting the need to focus on aspects of training that really matter in increasing the productivity of the organization!