How To Run a Training Survey

But ongoing training is a substantial investment, so you’ll want to make sure you get the maximum return on it. To do this, data from your training surveys needs to be measurable and trackable across the whole employee lifecycle. Here’s how to run training surveys that provide useful data and help you deliver tangible results in performance and development across your company.

Designing your training survey

Your employees will, we hope, have been taking part in engaging, challenging and useful training sessions. The last thing they’ll want to do afterward is fill out feedback surveys that are long, complex and time-consuming. The key is to keep the surveys concise with as few questions as possible – five will be enough.

1. How likely would you be to recommend this training course to a friend or colleague? The answer to this tells you how happy your employees were overall with the training. A positive outcome bodes well for the employees to be more productive and more inclined to attend further courses.
2. Did the course content deliver what you were expecting? Doing what you say you’ll do is an important driver of employee loyalty. Employees will feel disgruntled if the course delivered doesn’t give them the tools to do their job or develop within their role.
3. How much new information did you learn? Training is only useful if employees learn new things: a course where employees already know the content is valueless.
4. How useful was the course content? Learning new information is all well and good, but it needs to be relevant to, and useable by, the employee in their job after the training.
5. How engaging was your trainer? Employees are more likely to remember content delivered by an engaging trainer and return for more training if they found it enjoyable.

You may also wish to include questions about the training venue and catering. You will probably receive feedback such as ‘the coffee was horrible’, or ‘the room was too hot’ – these are transient concerns and of less significance as you track the effectiveness of training across the whole employee lifecycle. However, some open-text responses such as ‘there wasn’t a vegan option’ may reveal a gap in understanding and meeting your employees’ needs that you need to address in order to retain those people.

When to run a Training Survey

Survey immediately after every training session (no more than 24 hours afterward), to gather feedback while it’s still fresh in the attendees’ minds.

Seeing the link between training, development and retention

Ideally, your training courses will be tailored to impact your organisation’s most important key performance indicators (e.g. sales growth, customer engagement, return on investment, employee engagement, employee turnover). You will need to understand how effective your training is by measuring it against your KPIs.

By running training surveys along your employee lifecycle you’ll be able not only to measure the learning outcomes but also track how the training has impacted an employee’s performance over time.

When the results of your training surveys sit alongside all your other employee feedback data (performance reviews, employee engagement, productivity) on the same platform, you’ll easily be able to join the dots to see how your training programs impact every stage in the employee lifecycle. You’ll understand how the quality of your training affects the entire employee experience from onboarding ramp time, career development and succession planning, employee engagement and attrition rates, pinpointing areas that demonstrate a need for improvement.

See our predesigned Training Feedback XM Solution in action