Are You Satisfied?
By Patrick Mileham

The focus of Simpact this month is training satisfaction. Nearly every C-level executive has at one time or other asked someone on their staff to link ROI to their company’s training initiatives. Of course, to determine appropriate metrics for measuring ROI, each company—or department within that company—must first define the reasons and goals for the training. Basically, ROI can mean different things to different people at different times in different places.

It’s important to remember that learning is not a one-time event. Rather, it is a process that continues long after employees complete their training sessions. While it’s a given that many executives are interested in measuring the monetary return on their training investment, more attention is now being channeled to ROL—the return on learning that provides important competitive advantage opportunities, such as enhanced productivity and performance, improved staff moral, and more successful employee recruitment and retention efforts.

To discuss training satisfaction from a business perspective, we contacted NexLearn development partner Kara Gale with the MBM® Team at Koch Industries, which has approximately 80,000 employees, a presence in nearly 60 countries, and is called the world’s largest private company by Forbes.

KG: There are two primary reasons we use e-Learning programs. First, we want to reach more employees sooner. This is key, as we have grown in size and geographical span over the last several years. Second, we want to cover important, but basic, content prior to instructor-led training (prerequisites), so that the instructor-led training is more efficient and effective. Time can be spent on developing a deeper understanding and/or skills.

KG: For each course we’ve developed with NexLearn, our expectations/goals have been different. The first two were primarily to provide a general awareness to a wide, dispersed audience. With the third course on our employee selection process, our goal was to provide core content and to develop some level of skill, which can be further developed in the classroom and (of course) in real life.

KG: Feedback on the courses developed with NexLearn has been overwhelmingly positive. The instructional design, quality, and interactivity have made them appealing, and more importantly, engaging to those who take the courses.

KG: As with all training, the easy measure is participant feedback (did they like it or not). This is important because if they don’t like it, they probably aren’t engaged or learning much; however, just because the feedback is positive, that doesn’t mean that learning is automatically taking place. Like most organizations that do training, we are trying to figure out how to measure the effectiveness of our training efforts. Because the Selection CBT is a prerequisite to classroom training, we have an informal assessment of its effectiveness because of the knowledge and skills participants demonstrate in class. Early indicators are that the course is working – participants are coming into class knowing what we need them to know. It’s very exciting as a facilitator to be able to spend a majority of face-to-face classroom time facilitating learning and skill development.

KG: For future courses, we want to improve our ability to engage all learning styles within one course. The last course we implemented took us to a new level of interactivity within an e-Learning experience. We want to make e-Learning fun and engaging – not cute, but effective. We want to engage learners in a way that leads to discovery and/or deeper thinking and understanding. In short, we would like e-Learning experiences to be fun, challenging, and effective.