As a learning and development professional, you already know that the effectiveness of your training program relies on continuous learner feedback. Post-training surveys are an essential tool to measure the success of your learning management system (LMS) experience and the knowledge retention of your employees. But how should your organization design post-training survey questions for employees that will result in constructive employee feedback? In this blog, we’ll deep dive into why post-training surveys are important and how they can help you meet your organizational learning goals—taking your LMS experience to the next level.
Why post-training survey questions matter
Post-training surveys are crucial to the evolution and growth of your learning experiences and training programs. These surveys provide valuable employee feedback, helping organizations assess the impact of their courses and training processes. By asking objective questions about course content, learner engagement, and professional growth, post-training evaluation surveys deliver insights into the quality of your learning experiences. Above all, surveys help to ensure learning objectives are met, enhance overall user satisfaction, and create memorable training experiences for your workforce.
Ensuring learning objectives are met
To meet your company’s learning goals, it's important to evaluate whether your existing courses align with your broader business objectives. To do this, your learning leaders must assess if participants gain the intended knowledge and skills from your training programs. Through surveys, employees can express indispensable feedback and insights that help your company determine the success of your program.
Enhancing user engagement and satisfaction
On top of tracking progress toward goals, surveys are an invaluable tool to assess learner engagement with your online courses. Qualitative learner feedback can help your team identify any barriers to engagement and gather suggestions for improvement—supporting the creation of a captivating learning experience.
Additionally, measuring satisfaction with the course delivery and multimedia components can provide insights into your employee’s expectations and help identify opportunities for enhancement.
Continuous improvement of learning experiences
Lastly, to enhance your eLearning programs, it’s critical to collect feedback on the overall learner experience. By leaning into surveys, your company can make data-driven decisions on future training—potentially identifying better ways to deliver eLearning content that helps employees develop new skills and support your business growth.
Crafting effective post-training surveys: 3 vital steps
Creating effective post-training surveys requires strategic planning and mindful consideration. When designing post-training surveys, here are three key steps to start with:
1. Define the purpose of the survey
First, start by outlining the purpose of your survey—this will help guide the design and ensure that the questions align with your objectives. Plus, when the purpose is well-defined, your data becomes more meaningful and actionable. You'll be able to extract valuable insights that can inform improvements in your training program based on specific areas of concern or success.
2. Identify the information you need from trainees
Next, identify the specific information you need from survey participants such as learner feedback on the course content, your training process, or suggestions for improvement. Clearly identifying the information you need ensures that the survey focuses on gathering data that directly relates to your training objectives and outcomes.
3. Ensure the relevance of survey questions for employees
Lastly, when you’re designing post-training evaluation surveys, it’s essential to ensure that the survey questions for employees are both relevant and concise. By using clear language, you can avoid any confusion or misunderstandings that might arise among trainees. Moreover, it’s crucial to keep your employee survey brief—one pitfall of many surveys is irrelevant or extraneous information—be mindful to only include what’s needed so you don’t dilute the quality of insights collected.
Understanding different training evaluation question types
Including various types and formats of evaluation questions can help your organization collect more comprehensive, robust data. By creating a variety of questions, you enable respondents to provide both quantitative and qualitative data, delivering helpful feedback to accurately monitor and reignite your eLearning performance. Let's explore the different question types often used in training evaluations.
- Multiple choice questions: Multiple choice questions are a structured evaluation survey for organizations to gather feedback. With these types of questions, users select one or more answers from a list of predefined options. These questions are efficient for gathering quantitative data and can be used to easily assess knowledge or preferences.
- Likert scale questions: As part of post-training surveys, participants can rate their satisfaction on a scale using Likert scale questions. Employees rate their agreement or disagreement with a statement on a scale, usually ranging from "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree." This question type provides nuanced insights into participants' perceptions and attitudes.
- Open-ended questions: Another type of question is open-ended questions, which allow learners to share thoughts and feedback in detail. In their own words, participants can write free-text opinions to open-ended questions.
- Ranking questions: Lastly, with ranking questions, participants can rank a list of items in order of importance, preference, or effectiveness. Ranking questions can help your team identify priorities or preferences among different training components.
5 Tips to optimize your eLearning evaluations
Getting the most out of your online course evaluations requires a strategic approach to collecting, analyzing, and utilizing feedback. Below are our top tips to help you maximize the value of your employee surveys to boost the quality of your courses.
1. Leverage the right survey tools
To skillfully use survey tools for post-training evaluation, consider factors like easy creation and distribution, diverse question types, user-friendliness, conditional logic, and real-time reporting. Pro tip: Many learning management systems come equipped with these components so check with your learning software provider for options.
2. Tailor surveys to participants and the training experience
When designing survey questions, it is important to consider the background, skill level, and expectations of your employees. By customizing the questions to reflect the specific content and objectives of the training, you can gather valuable feedback that’s directly relevant to the course. Personalizing your questions will also help your users deliver more accurate feedback.
3. Strategically time evaluation surveys
Strategically time evaluation surveys after training sessions to gather immediate feedback and assess long-term effectiveness. Regularly follow up with additional surveys and send reminder emails to increase response rates. This approach will enable trainees to provide their thoughts while the training experience is still fresh in their minds.
4. Encourage honest responses and emphasize anonymity
Create a safe, anonymous environment for trainees to provide valuable feedback. Within your survey communications, emphasize the importance of opinions and confidentiality to foster open communication. Emphasizing anonymity will encourage honest responses and help learners feel comfortable sharing their thoughts openly.
5. Implement employee feedback regularly
Routinely reviewing and analyzing feedback is crucial for LMS improvement—but it’s even more important to actually implement changes. Making changes to your learning programs will help you better align with learner expectations and promote career growth at your company.
How training evaluations can enhance your learner experience
Post-training surveys are an essential tool for evaluating the effectiveness of your LMS experience. This user-generated data supports informed decisions to improve your training and ultimately your employees’ experience. Through evaluation feedback, you can create a cycle of continuous improvement and fine-tune your learning programs for optimal learner engagement.
Looking for an LMS designed to support your learner experience? Meet Absorb LMS. Absorb is a cloud-based learning management system (LMS) engineered to inspire learning and fuel business productivity. Learn more by scheduling a demo today.
