How to run training surveys (pre-training and post-training)

What are training surveys?

It’s essential that you know how effective your training is. Participant feedback can help you measure the effectiveness of your courses, improve them, and plan future training.

There are two types of survey:

• Pre-training: to inform how you run the training, how you deliver it, and what useful and relevant content it should have. It will also tell you about participants’ existing knowledge, expectations, needs, and wants.
• Post-training: these help you take a long, hard look at the outcomes of your training, making sure it fulfilled your goals and offered value for money.

The benefits of running training surveys

When you invest in training for your employees, they become more valuable to your company. That’s because developing your employees gives them a greater sense of self-worth, leading to increased productivity, less need for constant supervision, and reduced employee turnover.

The link between training, development, and retention

Ideally, your training courses will be tailored to impact your organisation’s most important key performance indicators (e.g. sales growth, customer engagement, return on investment, employee engagement, employee turnover). You will need to understand how effective your training is by measuring it against your KPIs.

By running training surveys along your employee lifecycle you’ll be able not only to measure the learning outcomes but also track how the training has impacted an employee’s performance over time.

When the results of your training surveys sit alongside all your other employee feedback data (performance reviews, employee engagement, productivity) on the same platform, you’ll easily be able to join the dots to see how your training programs impact every stage in the employee lifecycle. You’ll understand how the quality of your training affects the entire employee experience from onboarding ramp time, career development and succession planning, employee engagement and attrition rates, pinpointing areas that demonstrate a need for improvement.

Download our eBook: The Qualtrics handbook of survey question design

Training survey questions to ask

There are really only two kinds of survey questions: quantitative (objective and factual) and qualitative (subjective and based on opinion) However, you have many types of question and responses to choose from to measure quantitative and qualitative data, including:

• Single choice or multiple choice
• Likert scale
• Closed-ended questions
• Text entry (open-ended questions)
• Rating or ranking

Pre-training survey questions

Pre-training surveys don’t need to be very long, but they are useful for identifying demand, knowledge gaps, and expectations of the training. You’ll be able to tailor your training to what people really need.

Here are some question examples:

Questions that measure knowledge

You can either ask participants to evaluate their own knowledge or (more interesting) ask single-choice and multiple-choice questions to test that knowledge:

Questions that measure knowledge

Training is only useful if employees learn new things: a course where employees already know the content is valueless. You can either ask participants to self-evaluate what they learned or (more interesting) ask single-choice and multiple-choice questions to test that learning.

Questions that measure experience

The answer to these tells you how happy your employees were overall with the training. A positive outcome bodes well for the employees to be more productive and more inclined to attend further courses.

Questions that measure delivery

Employees are more likely to remember content delivered by an engaging trainer with interesting supporting materials and reliable tech, and return for more training if they found it enjoyable.

Questions that measure content

Learning new information is all well and good, but it needs to be relevant to, and usable by, the employee in their job after the training. And with lots of online training being delivered via Learning Management Systems (LMS), with multimedia (video, audio, animations), you need to know if there were technical glitches that affected the training.

When to run a post-training survey

Survey immediately after every training session (no more than 24 hours afterwards), to gather feedback while it’s still fresh in the participants’ minds. 

Best practice for training survey design

There’s a lot to think about when you design a survey that your respondents will love. If you follow these five simple rules, you’ll be able to produce great training surveys that give you insightful feedback every time:

1. Keep it short – no more than five questions.
2. Be concise – make questions as simple, and with as few words as possible. This way you avoid them being vague, ambiguous or open to interpretation, which will improve response rate.
3. Write as you speak – make questions conversational and avoid jargon or over-technical vocabulary.
4. Vary the question styles – you have a whole lot of question styles at your disposal, so use them to avoid respondent boredom. It’s important to include text entry so people can provide unstructured feedback.
5. Test your survey – run it past a friend or colleague to make sure they can easily use and understand it. Then tweak it accordingly.

But you don’t have to do all this yourself. Our training feedback solutions are included for all our customers.