In our last post, we discussed the idea of giving assessments in business training. We’ve established their necessity, that they measure how effective the training has been and how ready the trainees are to proceed with their re-defined processes. We know that assessments are crucial, and the identification of what to measure is equally as important, otherwise the whole assessment process is simply a formality. We are going to give an assessment, but what do we want that to measure? And how can we format the assessment to measure it?
Let’s take an example of a new process. I’ll take a page from my old manager and set up the example that we’re teaching a group of colleagues how to tie their shoes. We need to test them on how well they’ve learned the task so that they can repeat it in the future, and to what quality score they can repeat the process. How do we measure that? Well, when it comes to tying a shoe, it ultimately needs to be secure, it needs to be comfortable, and it needs to look clean. These would be our measurement objectives: security, comfortability, and neatness.
I realize that these categories are a little subjective… everyone ties shoes a little differently (myself included). But in the end, all business processes have an element of subjectivity. If you don’t have the correct technique (or process) you won’t end up with a quality result. We can measure this process by having a trainee demonstrate their understanding of the process in a live environment. Let’s say we have the trainee tie a shoe on the foot of the instructor (that way they can measure the security and comfortability of the shoe) If we want them to succeed, it may be beneficial to give them real-time advice as they are demonstrating their new shoe-tying skills. The instructor should watch their demonstration and give them a score on each of the three defined categories. If they feel that the trainee is competent in the process based on those scores, then they can say the training was successful.
What if we wanted to go deeper, and measure the process underlying the three categories? We need to measure the process itself and how well the trainees learned it. We could construct a written quiz to test their knowledge prior to the demonstration. But we need to make sure the questions are written in a way that are easy to understand, but not too complicated and an easy give-away. As a teaser, take a look at these tips to writing quiz questions, and we’ll discuss this in our next post.
Photo credit: My Shoes
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