Research shows that organizational training improves performance of both employees and organizations. Analytics provides a good opportunity for companies to research the effectiveness of their training programs in terms of productivity, sales, attitudes, and worker well-being. These sorts of analytics can give an advantage to organizations that want to improve their training functions to achieve the best organizational results. Analytics can also show where a training program may need to be tweaked to improve it.
Analytics requires measures of training effectiveness, and the challenge is finding practical ways to measure training effectiveness. As we will discuss in this chapter, we know that training outcomes can be broken down into four categories: (1) trainee reactions to the training, (2) whether trainees actually learned, (3) trainees’ behavior back on the job, and (4)
organizational results (e.g., financial improvements for the company). But collecting these types of data in organizations is not always easy.

Some organizations are addressing the challenges of measuring the effectiveness of their training. Allstate Insurance developed a single set of standardized training performance measures. This allowed Allstate to compare training performance in different business units across the company.

Case Discussion Questions 

1. Give an example of a performance measure that you think could be used across a single company for different types of jobs.
2. What are some factors—in addition to the training itself—that could affect how well people do in training?
3. If you were a manager, what would you want to know about a training program to determine if it is effective?