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How Quizzes Can Help You Evaluate the Results of Employee Training

Training is vital to any successful organization. Getting training right can be difficult. Measuring how successful and effective that training was can be significantly more difficult still. 

As an HR professional, working out the ROI of any training, particularly if it was purchased or delivered externally, is essential. But doing this can be difficult.

How do you go about truly capturing your employees’ thoughts? How can you ensure that the data you capture truly reflects the training and reflects any knowledge gained? If you have a system in place that can do these things already, then how can you go about making it more flexible and dynamic? 

While enrolling yourself onto an HR training course will provide you with the soft skills and ideas for doing this, a more immediate solution to these conundrums can lie in quizzes.

What is a Quiz?

What is meant by the word ‘quiz’ in this context? In short: a quiz is a questionnaire. It is not a school-like pop quiz designed to test knowledge in readiness for an exam or essay; it is designed to measure the effectiveness of training and at-work learning. 

In fact, quizzes can even be made to be an essential part of any onboarding process as they can be used to check for gaps in any new recruits’ knowledge. This can then be used to help get them the right training for their new role.

In this era in which virtual training has had to become a part of the everyday, quizzes are as important as ever, as they allow for a direct line of communication between you and your employees. 

What Makes an ROI Quiz Good?

When it comes to working in HR, this is the $64,000 question. Just how do you go about capturing useful data?

First and foremost, any feedback form has to be anonymous. That way, employees are less likely to feel compelled to write what they think you want to read. But, in order to hold attention and avoid simply being rushed, it also has to be kept as short as possible. This means that you need to get to the heart of what you want your employees to have learnt as quickly as possible. 

You also need to make sure that your questions are not leading, and that they allow respondents to answer openly and honestly and make their own opinions clear. 

In short: if those who have been trained have demonstrable knowledge after the fact, then you have secured a good ROI. 

Looking at Demonstrable Knowledge

This is probably the hardest thing to gage: just how much have your employees learnt from their training? This is perhaps best explained with an example. 

Say, for example, that a software program regularly used at your organization has just undergone a major update changed the way it fundamentally works. Your employees might need to be urgently trained in how to use the revamped software. 

First and foremost, you will need to get an idea of what they already know. By asking them to fill out a quiz, you can get a good understanding of what everyone knows and find the course that most closely matches the gaps in their knowledge. The fact that your employees will already have completed one quiz prior to any training even being booked also means that you will have a readily available control sample against which you can measure how much they have actually learnt. 

By having these control quizzes in place, you can gage just how much has or has not been learnt. Once you have a few sets of control and post-training quizzes to hand, you might even be able to begin looking at which training methods work best for your employees and which do not. Having broadly generalisable information like this will be invaluable to you when it comes to organizing training further down the line.

But quizzes can also serve another, equally important purpose: they can help you to capture employee feedback.

Capturing Feedback

In addition to imparting knowledge, good training also leaves your employees feeling satisfied — and having enjoyed the whole experience. Ideally, training should be enjoyable, as well as educational. 

You can break your feedback quizzes into two types: flash and longer-form. Flash quizzes — also known as flash evaluations — are handed out as soon as any training has been completed. The idea of these quizzes is to capture immediate feedback, so that you can get an idea of your employees’ initial reactions and first gut instincts. 

After your employees have digested their training and have taken the knowledge quiz, then you can ask them for longer, more detailed feedback. This quiz need not be an essay, but it should aim to dig into the nuances and overall experiences of any training. 

But feedback quizzes also serve another purpose. They can help you to gain an insight into how your employees best learn. 

If your employees have learnt a lot and have enjoyed their course, then that would suggest that that method or way of learning works well for them. If they have still learnt but have not enjoyed the course, then you know to adapt the method of delivery. Remember, training should be fun as well as informative. 

The Main Points

Quizzes can be an essential part of making sure that you deliver good, quality, concise and enjoyable training to your employees. In this context, a quiz refers to more of a questionnaire, rather than an exam-style quiz. 

When it comes to the role of quizzes in training, it is twofold. First and foremost, quizzes can be used to gage whether or not you have got a good ROI on your training by testing your employees’ knowledge. This can be done both before and after any training to really get a sense of what has been learnt and what was prior knowledge. 

But quizzes can also allow you to capture feedback. Provided that they are kept anonymous, you can be sure of honest and open feedback. Feedback quizzes can be both flash — given out directly after training has finished — and longer-form, delivered after-the-fact in order to gage how enjoyable the training was once information has been digested. 

Quizzes can be an essential component of your organization’s training strategy. So, why not start implementing their use today?