How to measure the impact of your training with data

What is not measured, does not improve. As trainers, we want to make the training experience as comprehensive and effective as possible, and for this, it is very important to measure the impact they cause. Every course we take without collecting data is a lost opportunity for improvement.

Although no measurement system is perfect and even less for evaluating qualitative characteristics such as performance or impact, it is always better than having nothing. These measurements will serve as a basis for improving our future courses and knowing what direction to follow in our training. 

To make a complete measurement of our training it is important to measure four areas: the execution of the training, the learning of the students, the impact on people and the impact on the business.

 

1. Evaluate the execution

This type of evaluation will allow us to improve the training activities, the teacher's performance, the applicability of what has been learned, among other aspects.

On your Foxize Cloud platform, your students will be able to rate the course taken through a star rating system in online courses or from a questionnaire that is sent to participants in live-classes courses.

When analyzing ratings, you must take into account the distortion of the average marks. A training course has a mark of 3.5 out of 5, but when breaking it down, we discover that 10 students have scored it with 5/5, one with 4/5 and three with 1/5. So… Is it a training failure? To avoid this distortion, we recommend that you delete the data for the two best and the two worst grades.

For a more qualitative evaluation, you have access to the comments of your students on the courses. You will be able to see the opinion of the course in general or of the different editions, and assess whether you should make changes to your training sessions or check that your modifications have improved the training sessions.

You can also create your own personalized questionnaires through tools such as Typeform or Google Form to better define the points you want your students to evaluate.

 

2. Learning Measurement

With this assessment, we intend to measure whether we have been able to transmit knowledge to our students. In fact, these measurements are part of the training: they are exercises, projects and evaluation tests. That is why we must work these activities well from the beginning, in the design of the training and the teaching guide.

With your Foxize Cloud platform, you can link tests and exercises to measure the learning of your students. They are easy to parameterize and automate.

For example, you can take a comprehension test starting the training subject and provide another at the end, so we can compare and see the improvement of the student or know which points of our course have not been understood well and need a revision. 

 

3. Personal impact

At this point, we want to measure how the training has affected the student's personal and professional life, for example improving motivation or their productivity at work. 

If your project is part of an organization, it is easier to collect this information through the improvement of the efficiency in their jobs, or through mechanisms to measure the motivation of your employees done by the Human Resources team.

You can also measure whether their skills and knowledge have impacted their job position through diagnostic tests on the subject of the course. Taking the test before the course will give us a base grade, and doing it a few months after the course will help us to check if we have improved or not. 

You can import tests from Foxize.com and its benchmark, made up of more than 80,000 active professionals and a total of 15 sectors represented. This way, the user will be able to compare himself individually with other professionals, even in the same sector.

In the case of being a company, this diagnosis should be carried out with certain periodicity to evaluate what the weaknesses are, what points your employees should improve and identify the level of the team compared to the competition. 

 

4. Impact on the business

Whether training is your main source of income, a line of business or is part of the HR strategy of your company, it is important to measure the direct impact it has on your figures: courses sold, increased sales, new users, new corporate projects…

It is also important to calculate the return on investment (ROI). The ROI formula is as follows:

Net benefits / Course costs x 100

If the result is greater than 100%, it means that the course is profitable and is providing benefits.

 

We hope that with these 4 measurement points you can improve your formations. If you don't have your school yet, we offer you 30 free days so you can try Foxize Cloud, without obligation!