Evaluation of In-Company Continuing Education and Training – Influencing Factors (2014)

The corporate culture and the support of the managers have the greatest influence on the evaluation process.

Content of the Study

Several studies deal with hurdles and problems in the evaluation of continuing vocational training in companies. This study therefore examined whether, from the point of view of the personnel developers surveyed, there are influences that condition or support the evaluation in addition to the hurdles. The evaluation was divided into the four sub-steps according to Kirkpatrick and a calculation of the ROI in order to also examine the influences on the individual steps.

To collect data, 30 HR developers reconstructed their own perception of possible factors influencing the evaluation procedure in personal interviews. The individual reconstructions were then combined into an overall structure (illustration).

Whether a measure is carried out internally or externally has no influence on the evaluation procedure of the personnel developers. The content of a measure was most often cited as influential by the training-specific factors. The questionnaire is the common instrument of evaluation, regardless of the level up to which the evaluation is carried out in the company.

In practice, corporate culture and executive support directly influence the stages leading up to the review of learning transfer. Personnel developers see their own characteristics as influencing the review of learning success and learning transfer. The HR developers see the managers as mainly responsible for reviewing the operational results. Only the costs of measures were mentioned as an influence on the calculation of the ROI.

Practical Advice

• It is very important that the corporate culture sends clear signals and gives the evaluation sufficient time and importance even in financially difficult phases.
• Managers must be involved. Especially for the review of the critical transfer level, the support of managers is essential.
• Managers must be assigned and communicated a clear understanding of their role in the evaluation process, as well as the necessary instruments.
• The review of the second and third levels is influenced by a variety of measure-specific factors. Here, fixed standards must be established on the part of personnel development in order to obtain uniform and comparable data.
• The tools and data for calculating benefits are lacking to check the ROI. Although the training costs are often recorded, these alone have no significance.
• Companies must ensure that the evaluation results do not degenerate into data corpses and instead have an influence on the evaluation process

Quick Facts:

Source: Own study

Methods: Qualitative interviews using the structure-laying method

This article comes from the Xing group Science meets HRD