Vendors must train their staff, customers and partners.  Resellers must train their staff and their customers.  For anyone to do their job effectively or use the products and services they purchase, they often need to be trained.  That training can be in the form of self-guided training or formal classroom training.  There are many formats such as eLearning, webinars, classroom based training, books, study guides, "cheat sheets" and many others.

In the end, the most important consideration with any training is ensuring the training was effective.  But what does that mean?

Training has been evaluated on four levels:

• Satisfaction - did the trainees enjoy the experience?
• Knowledge - did the trainees learn what they were supposed to learn?
• Application - Did the trainees change their behavior and apply what they learned?
• Results - were the corporate results (profitability, turnover, cash flow, etc.) improved?

It's easiest to measure satisfaction results.  Just ask the people in the training, did you like it?  It's not much harder to assess knowledge transfer.  Quizzes are useful tools to see if someone remembers the facts that were presented in the training.  Measuring application and results is a bit more complex, but doable.

Some companies spend alot of money measuring application and results of training.  That may be justified in many cases.  It may also be possible, though, to predict those returns on training by knowing what to look for.  For instance, one might ask employees how much time to spend performing a particular function before the training and then ask again 30, 60 or 90 days after the training.  It may not be very scientific (although it can be), but it can at least guage whether that which was taught is being applied on the job.

Whatever the approach, my recommendation is that you at least consider how you evaluate training whether it is for partners, staff or customers.  Don't be satisfied just knowing whether someone liked it or not.  Frankly, some of the most impactful lessons I have learned were not events that made me smile when I was going through them!

William Vanderbilt

+1 630 343 6261

WVanderbilt@InnovativeLearningChannels.com