Feedback plays a critical role in many aspects of business. Gathering feedback from employees can provide them with a sense of belonging. Actioning that feedback to improve operations can enhance the way you do business and have a massive impact on employee satisfaction and retention.
Collecting and analysing training feedback in particular has the potential to enhance your training courses and improve employee engagement. It plays a critical role in fostering a growth culture that values learning, development and continuous assessment.
What is Training Feedback?
Training feedback is the collection and analysis of opinions on learning initiatives. It can take many different forms including questionnaires, interviews, anonymous surveys and more.
People often ask about the difference between training feedback and training evaluation. While the two may seem similar at first, they are distinct processes.
Training evaluation refers to an in-depth analysis of learning from multiple sources, often comparing the results of training to larger company goals and objectives. Efforts to collect feedback can form an integral part of this bigger process, but they can also be conducted without further evaluation taking place. There are also plenty of other factors and techniques involved in training evaluation beyond gathering learner feedback.
Why is Training Feedback Important?
Learning is a subjective process. Each learner will approach training courses with their own knowledge and experience behind them, which can significantly impact their learning experience and the effectiveness of training.
Educators can spend months carefully planning training initiatives, and still find that learners don’t connect with the training materials in the way they anticipated. Sometimes they don’t accommodate different learning styles effectively or use the wrong type of assessment for engagement. In other cases, it could be the language that’s used. It could even just be that the learner is undergoing training at the wrong time for them to fully engage with the content.
There are so many facets to the learning process that the most efficient way of understanding where training courses can be improved is by gathering, analysing and actioning feedback.
Your Training Feedback Template
Understanding the importance of feedback and knowing how to gather it are two separate matters. We’ve taken the guesswork out of collecting feedback by gathering the most popular and effective training feedback questions and putting them into a handy downloadable template
With these 21 questions, you can:
- Easily share the template to effortlessly gather feedback
- Gain valuable insights into your training initiatives
- Pinpoint areas for training improvement
- Highlight aspects of training that you’re nailing
Download the free training feedback template today.
Take the Guesswork Out of Feedback!
Use our effective training feedback questions to start collecting insights.5 Benefits of Collecting Feedback on Your Training Programs
We’ve already looked at a few of the advantages of training feedback. However, there are many long-term benefits of feedback collection that businesses often overlook. These include:
1. Improved Engagement
The more engaged learners are with your training content, the better their knowledge retention will be. Training feedback can help you make future employee training programs more effective and engaging. Just as importantly, actively encouraging learners to think of improvements for a training course they’ve completed can help learner engagement with existing content as well.
Want to boost knowledge retention?
Understanding the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve can help.2. Show Employees You Care
Actively asking for and encouraging feedback and taking it onboard into future training planning shows employees that their opinions are heard and appreciated. This enhances overall employee satisfaction. You’ll show that the people who work for the company are valuable contributors whose feedback directly impacts your operations and culture.
3. Build Valuable Soft Skills
Expressing opinions and openly communicating them are not skills that come naturally to everyone. These power skills can be critical assets to your systems and processes. By enhancing communication and other soft skills, you’re setting your business up for long-term and large-scale success.
Looking for courses to enhance your teams’ soft skills?
These 10 free courses will help them level up in no time.4. Direct Upskilling and Reskilling
Training feedback is also a great opportunity to identify skill gaps and areas of further training for your employees. It will give you a better idea of how well learners understand their training sessions. This will make it easier to pinpoint areas where upskilling and reskilling may be valuable to individuals and your business as a whole.
5. Ideas for Future Training Initiatives
Often the feedback that you gather from training sessions will provide you with ideas for future courses and training programs. If learners identify areas that they want to learn more about, or ideas that weren’t effectively covered within your training program, it provides an opportunity for your business to develop content for those subjects.
Challenges of Collecting Training Feedback
Despite the many ways that honest feedback can benefit your business, getting the feedback that you need is not without its challenges.
Lack of Willingness
Educators are often uncomfortable gathering feedback, and learners are often uneasy providing it.
From an educator’s perspective, it takes significant time and effort to gather feedback. In the case of employee training, training can take educators away from their other responsibilities as well. The idea of having to regularly follow up to get unwilling participants to provide their opinions can feel pointless.
From a learner perspective, many feel that if they provide feedback that criticises the training programs, there could be negative consequences. This is especially when the educator is a colleague or manager, rather than someone they’re unfamiliar with.
Asking the Wrong Questions
Putting together training feedback survey questions can often take almost as much time as putting together a training course itself. Generic questions may have their place, but the most valuable feedback will come from questions that specifically relate to your training objectives. When training serves a particular purpose for your company, as all good training does, gathering feedback on how well it meets that purpose holds great potential. It can guide training enhancements and help you achieve and exceed your objectives.
Feedback as an Afterthought
Many companies that do gather feedback often send out a generic survey at the end of their training program without much thought or planning. They don’t consider what they want to achieve, or the kind of feedback that they want to get. It’s an ad-hoc process that’s done as an afterthought, with the feedback received often going unread or quickly scanned without any action coming from it.
This approach to feedback is exactly why both educators and learners often feel that training feedback is a waste of time. If the process isn’t carefully thought through and gathering data is inconsistent or ineffective, it becomes futile.
Methods of Collecting Training Feedback
Just as there are many different types of learning styles, so there are a wide range of methods that you can use to collect feedback. Some are best suited to pre-training, helping you to gauge learner expectations. Others are best used during the training process and can direct the training course itself. Still others work well for post-training evaluations. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Surveys
Employee surveys and questionnaires have become the most popular method of gathering feedback, and it’s easy to see why. With the right assessment tool you can put together a feedback questionnaire in minutes. And distributing surveys to learners can even form part of the training program itself, rather than being a separate initiative.
Surveys can be used at any time during the training process. For example, you can include a task for sending out employee surveys on training as part of your onboarding checklist. You can also create an employee engagement survey to understand where a training course could be made more interesting or interactive. Pulse surveys that ask one question at a time can also boost engagement, since they take minimal time and effort to complete.
One-on-One Interviews
360 performance reviews and check-ins are also a great time to ask for feedback on training initiatives. Often employees will feel more comfortable discussing their opinions on a training program with their direct manager, rather than with the person that ran the training itself. Exit and stay interviews, which prioritise honest feedback in general, are also good opportunities to discuss an employee’s thoughts on the training that was or is being provided.
Group Sessions
People often discuss their opinions more openly in a group setting. Hearing others’ feedback not only encourages individuals to share their own input, but it can also be a reminder about aspects of their own learning experience that they enjoyed, connected with or found frustrating.
Group sessions are a great tool for getting feedback on expectations before a course starts, or for wrapping up a training session. They’re best suited to in-person training or blended learning environments that facilitate Zoom calls, group hangouts, or social learning in general.
Struggling with planning group sessions?
We’ve got the free course you need.Feedback Sites
Feedback sites provide an opportunity for group interaction even when individual learners aren’t in the same space. They work on the same principle as group sessions – that people are more willing to share feedback when they see others doing the same. The benefit of feedback sites, however, is that it’s easier to provide anonymous input, and it provides more effective feedback mechanisms to remote and hybrid employees.
Suggestion Boxes
Not every feedback method needs to be digital. Suggestion boxes are an age-old solution for gathering learner insights that still works well today. Having a suggestion box for in-person training sessions can serve as a reminder for learners to share how they feel during the training itself. It’s also easy to incorporate suggestion boxes into feedback sites, or to quickly add a comment box or email prompt into a training course. This encourages suggestions while still maintaining anonymity.
Best Practices You Can Follow For Effective Training Feedback
Ready to start collecting feedback on your training program? Here are a few tips and best practices that can help you maximise the benefits of feedback and manage challenges. Following these will help you turn training into a successful process that contributes towards your overall business goals.
Create a safe feedback environment
It’s critical that learners feel comfortable providing feedback. If they think that any negative consequences could result from sharing their opinions, they simply won’t share them. Providing options for anonymous feedback can be a big help in assuring learners that any feedback is appreciated and won’t impact their role.
It’s also important for educators to frame feedback in a positive light. Explaining that any opinions won’t be taken personally, and highlighting the aim of continuous improvement will help to remove doubts and encourage the sharing of honest feedback.
Clear goals
Having clear objectives that you want to achieve will help to guide the feedback planning process. It will help you choose the right time and method for gathering data, and can see you asking relevant questions to shape existing and future course content. It will also contribute towards a more effective training evaluation in general.
Find the Right Time
It’s important to carefully consider when you want to gather feedback from learners. If you want to improve the learner experience for those already undergoing training, waiting for the end of the course will be too late. On the other hand, post training evaluations provide a more thorough picture of your overall training and how successful it is. Identifying the right time to gather feedback will depend on those clear goals that you set.
Want to enhance your learner experience?
Use these top learner experience trends to guide your training programs.Analyse and Interpret Data
Collecting training feedback is only one part of the process. It also needs to be carefully analysed and interpreted to find actionable insights that will have real impact. Gathering information and analysing it are two very different skillsets. Having the right tools behind you can help you visualise data more clearly to find trends in feedback, and areas of both strength and weakness in your training programs.
Act on Feedback
Once you’ve analysed feedback on your training program’s effectiveness, it’s time to turn the insights into action. While it’s important to consider all suggestions, it’s also critical to take a strategic approach to implementing changes. Sometimes a small change can have a big impact. On the other hand, making too many changes at once can often result in a training course becoming unrecognisable, and facing new challenges as a result.
Encourage Constructive Feedback
Some types of feedback are more valuable to training evaluation than others. Positive feedback that is generic may be motivational for educators, but does little to indicate training effectiveness. In a similar way, negative feedback that doesn’t pinpoint areas for improvent or suggestions for enhancements will be little help in guiding future training initiatives. Helping learners understand how to provide constructive feedback, and helping educators receive it without taking it personally, will be a great asset to your overall training program.
Finding The Right Tools For The Job
Gathering feedback on your training programs can be a challenge for businesses. However, tools like Cloud Assess can be an invaluable asset to the process. As an all-in-one platform, Cloud Assess is your one-stop shop for learning management, course management, content management and so much more.
This makes Cloud Assess the perfect tool for not only creating and delivering training to your teams and learners, but collecting feedback on those courses as well. You can quickly and easily create post-training surveys and send them out as part of an automated workflow once a training course has been completed. You can even track and report on learners’ progress through courses, helping you to find the right time to ask for feedback. This can be particularly useful for sending surveys to employees who may be stuck or progressing slowly through training content.
Cloud Assess also goes beyond helping you gather insights from survey participants, and helps you analyse that data as well with powerful reporting features.
Are you ready to see the impact that an all-in-one training platform can have on your operations? Sign up for a Explore Pricing today.
