My reputation was getting battered, and I didn't like it.

This was years ago, when I supervised a training department in a contact center. New hires often struggled after completing our initial training program, and their supervisors would conveniently blame my team.

The training program wasn't the problem, but I couldn't prove it. The contact center director wasn’t interested in my perspective when she had multiple supervisors saying their agents had not been properly trained. Feelings became facts in the absence of data.

So I decided to find a way to get the data.

This led me to take a crash course on training evaluation. I didn't discover any of the models popular in the training industry—I'd learn about those several years later. My sole focus was proving new hires had been trained.

The solution turned out to be incredibly simple. It gave me observable, quantifiable data that irrefutably proved new hires had been trained. If they struggled after training, there had to be some other reason.

Here's the simple principle I discovered, and how you can use it to evaluate your training programs as well.

A trainer guiding contact center agents through an exercise in a training class.

Why is it important to evaluate training?

Evaluation can tell you whether or not training is working, and what needs to be improved.

This can be done on a program level, where you evaluate the entire training program. Evaluation can also take place on an individual level, where you evaluate whether a participant has been fully trained.

It's an issue that gets executive attention. PwC's 2019 CEO survey discovered that CEOs see a lack of skills as a clear threat to the business:

79 percent feel a skill gap is a threat to the business
47 percent say a skill gap impacts customer experience
Just 29 percent believe they have adequate data to address the issue

In my case, my department's credibility was at stake. I needed to find data I could show to our contact center director that proved our training programs were working just fine.

This is where evaluation comes in. (You can find more reasons to evaluate training here.)

How to evaluate training

There's one thing you should do first if you want to evaluate training: set clear learning objectives. The objectives should be specific, observable, and measurable.

This was the approach I took in the contact center.

I asked the supervisors, their managers, and the contact center director to describe what a fully trained agent looked like. The goal was to get their agreement on what an agent should be able to do before they graduated training.

Our agreement centered around the contact center's quality monitoring process. The leadership team agreed that agents needed to achieve passing quality scores on live calls before they graduated new hire training.

The rest was now easy.

New hires already took live calls in class, under the watchful eye of a trainer. The only change we had to make was have the trainer complete a monitoring form for several calls per agent.

This approach provided a lot of instant benefits:

Documented each agent had been trained.
Identified specific skills for agents to improve.
Tracked areas where the training program needed to improve.

Notice the goals we set centered around agents doing the actual job. Evaluating training based on passing a quiz or getting through a certain amount of content doesn't provide proof that someone has been trained. We need to see them do the work.

You can establish your own training goals using the A-B-C-D method. This model will guide you through a simple process.