Whether you’re running your first business or have been in the industry for a while, at some point, you’ll be hiring and onboarding new employees for the business.

New employees bring with them new skills, experiences, and technologies, and can offer a fresh perspective on your business operations and day-to-day activities.

The onboarding process is a crucial stage in your new hires’ journeys, one that will equip them with the knowledge and skills required to excel in their roles. Since training programs are an investment, it’s important to have a way of measuring their effectiveness.

In this guide, you’ll learn what makes an effective training program, why training effectiveness is so essential, and how to make sure your training program makes the grade.

Why do I need to hire new employees in the first place?

Businesses operate in dynamic markets that are frequently changing in terms of consumer preferences, levels of competition, and trends. Operating a business in such a market is kind of like the survival of the fittest. Unless you adapt to market conditions and introduce new changes to your business, you might not make the cut.

Recruiting new employees helps bring new skill sets, knowledge, and expertise into your business.

New hires coming into their jobs are fired up and ready to contribute in terms of productivity and creativity — and that can give your business a competitive advantage. Your existing employees will also perform better as the competition within the business itself increases, thereby improving the efficiency of your business.

No matter why you’ve decided to bring on new hires, the efficacy of their training is going to play a crucial role in how the next few months go. But how can you tell whether your training is truly effective?

Determining if your training program is effective

If you’ve tried every training method in the book and your employees are still scrambling to complete their tasks, that’s an indication that your methods are ineffective — or that you haven’t stuck with one method long enough to see results!

If your new hires are performing inefficiently even after hours of training, it’s a sign that they haven’t understood what they were taught. A well-designed training program doesn’t only equip the individual with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their job, it also paints a picture of the real-time operations of the business.

Unhappy customers or clients, confused employees, and inefficient processes are all signs of ineffective training.

Steering away from training methods that are as clear as mud

There’s a comprehensive system of checks and balances that you can utilize to get a clearer picture of your training effectiveness.

Donald Kirkpatrick, president of the American Society for Training and Development, lays out this system in his book “Evaluating Training Programs” (finally, a book with a straightforward title). Kirkpatrick systematizes four levels of training evaluation:

1. Reaction
2. Learning
3. Behavior
4. Results

Reaction: Be open to feedback.

Kirkpatrick recommends that you first observe the reactions of your trainees.

If your employees treat your material like a high school calculus class — you might want to rethink your program.

As with any form of learning, it’s important that you ask for feedback (or distribute questionnaires) to identify whether the future personnel of your business have understood the basics. This is an easy and inexpensive method for correcting issues at their root, ensuring that subsequent training programs will be more successful.

Learning: Assess and test employees.

Just like students have exams at the beginning and the end of a semester, Kirkpatrick recommends carrying out learning evaluations to assess training effectiveness.

It can be a written assessment, interview, or other evaluation method that identifies whether new hires have been effectively taught the knowledge and skills in question. This is done by comparing new hires’ answers before and after the training program.

If new hires score well on these assessments, you’re on the right track. Written assessments are also a way for you to identify the areas where new hires have performed poorly, allowing you to run through the necessary areas once more before moving on to further training.

Behavior and Results: Evaluate if employees apply the skills.

You can also appoint a supervisor or manager to carry out a behavior evaluation.

Through this, you’ll be able to identify whether new hires are putting the skills they learned into action and if they’re progressing throughout the training period.

Evaluating if they’re applying what they’ve learned is important because not doing so will reduce the overall performance of your business. If a new hire is failing to apply those skills, it means they’re probably not sure how they can best carry out their work.

As with anything in life, the key to identifying whether all that time and effort has been worth it lies in the results. If you are a product-oriented business, you can assess the quality of the product according to the standards required.

If you are a customer/service-oriented business, you can look at the number of complaints received and the number of issues resolved. If your training has been effective, your employees will perform well — the proof is in the pudding.

Words of advice when following the Kirkpatrick method

Step 1: Don’t rely too heavily on self-reported data.

It’s important that you carefully analyze the results you obtain from questionnaires and interviews.

Self-reported data is subject to social desirability bias, AKA responding to questions in a socially desirable way. They’re also influenced by interviewer bias, which occurs when respondents manipulate their answers to match the perceived aim of the interviewer.

Rather than focusing on singular answers, identifying general patterns in responses such as areas of above-average or poor performance will allow you to analyze the effectiveness of your training program. If you feel that certain answers are biased towards a particular paradigm, it’s best to exclude that response when analyzing your data.

Step 2: Understand that performance indicators are also affected by external factors.

Businesses operate in dynamic markets, right? Exchange rates fluctuate, the costs of raw materials vary, the economic conditions of a country change, and customer preferences differ from time to time.

Your new hires have taken part in an effective training program and they’re performing well, but these external factors can affect their performance. As the owner or recruiter of a business, it’s important to understand that the overall performance of a business is influenced by a multitude of factors — not just the performance of your staff.

Step 3: Plan before you take action.

Ultimately, the system you implement to measure the effectiveness of your training program is in your hands.

Creating a proper system is easier said than done. It requires training supervisors and managers so that they know what to look for when carrying out behavior evaluations, questionnaires, and interviews that serve as indicators for measuring performance.

Ensure that the measures you implement provide valid results that'll benefit your business, rather than incurring additional costs and wasting resources.

Step 4: Prevention is better than cure.

It’d be a lot easier if you implemented the perfect training program at the start, right? As the manager or owner of a business, you can save yourself a lot of trouble if you introduce the right system at the outset.

Start things off on the right foot — from job orientation to the gradual integration of new employees into your business.

A great place to start is to utilize tools and platforms — such as an LMS-alternative — that can help elevate your training game.

While there are countless software platforms available on the market, not all of them will offer the right combination of features and capabilities to deliver a satisfactory training experience. Therefore, it’s crucial to choose a tool that not only satisfies your business needs but also yields a positive return on investment in terms of improving training effectiveness.

Ready to train your new hires and set them up to become effective employees?

As Zig Ziglar said: “Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission.”

Train your new hires so that they understand what your business stands for — an “absolute sense of mission” will take you to greater heights.

The better trained your employees are, the easier it will be for you to carry out your day-to-day functions. As managers and recruiters, you can count on a set of new hires to boost your business’ performance and its overall image with an effective orientation and training program.

Technology allows businesses to leverage digital tools that can help them measure the effectiveness of training for their new hires. A top-level LMS-alternative not only allows you to streamline the training process but also offers different learning modalities that fit the diverse learning needs of your new hires.

Each trainee is different, and they have their own set of strengths and weaknesses. The right virtual training LMS-alternative can help you customize and personalize training modules for each new hire so that you cater to their specific needs instead of just providing generalized learning material. They also give you clear insights into their performance metrics so you can tweak or revamp them as you go along.

So what‘re you waiting for? Sign up for Trainual and take your training program to the next level.