Project Management Training (ASTD Trainers Workshop)

Most people think of training evaluation as the process of filling out a one- or two-page form at the end of a workshop and tallying the results. As a training professional, you know that there is much more to it than that; and yet we often find ourselves trapped into having our entire training initiative judged on the basis of that one document. Let ‚ s face it: If the evals aren ‚ t good, your training program may be doomed from the start. Therefore, you will want to spend some time constructing an evaluation instrument that accurately measures the things that matter. At the same time, you want to identify other measures that look more globally at the short- and long- term effects of your training effort. In other words, you would like to gather information that eventually will tell you:

• how well the workshops addressed real business needs

• how well the workshop facilitators delivered the workshop

• how much the participants enjoyed the workshop

• whether the participants actually learned the concepts presented

• whether the participants retained those concepts once they left the training room

• whether the participants actually applied the concepts when they returned to the workplace

• if the participants did apply the concepts, whether doing so resulted in any perceptible improvement in job performance

• whether, over time, there were sufficient performance improvements to demonstrate increased revenues , reduced costs, better service, or faster throughput.

Unfortunately, many project management training programs fail to evaluate beyond the first three points ‚ despite the fact that the remaining points were usually the reason the training program was launched to begin with.