Best training survey questions to evaluate effectiveness

You’ve put in time and resources to design a new training course. Now that you’re ready to implement this training, you need to make sure you’re creating the right conditions for learning.

A famous quote from Henry Ford stresses the importance of quality training practices: “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”

Surveys can be an effective way to measure how well prepared and knowledgeable your newly trained staff are. By asking the right questions, you can better identify the staff members who need a little more support. In addition, good training survey questions give you insight into the modifications and improvements you might want to make for future training programs.

3 pretraining survey questions

Asking questions before the training allows you to use real-time information to shape the course for the group taking it. You can also gain a clear perspective about what trainees are expecting.

Pretraining survey questions are usually short and simple. Here are a few potential questions you might use:

1. What are you hoping to learn from this training? You have a goal for the training, and you need to ensure that trainees understand the intention of the course and the company’s expectations of them. Compare these survey responses with the content in your course to identify potential areas of improvement in the curriculum.
2. What topics would you like to learn? List the answers to this question in categories. Examples include customer service, reporting, company policies, negotiation, sales strategies, dealing with difficult coworkers, and more.
3. What are your current goals for professional development? This question ensures that your training offers the highest levels of support for participants who want to advance their careers.

6 post-training survey questions

Consider using these important survey questions at the conclusion of the training to evaluate the effectiveness of your program:

1. How much new information did you learn in this training? There are times when you intend the training to be a refresher course. But most training programs should provide new information to improve your employees’ skills and knowledge. Asking this question can help you find points of redundancy — then you can streamline your training systems.
2. How do you rate the quality of this information? Give participants an option to rate the experience on a scale of one to five. If a training receives a lot of low ratings, that means the content didn’t match the needs of your employees.
3. How do you rate the quality of the instructor? Good training materials aren’t effective without a quality presentation. Ask participants for feedback about the teacher. High ratings are an indication that the instructor built good rapport with the training participants.
4. Was the training relevant to your job? Make sure the course is relevant to participants by asking how the information supports their current job requirements. This helps you determine whether the training efforts are helpful and useful.
5. Do you have any suggestions for improving this training? Open-ended questions like this provide trainees an opportunity to bring up points you may not have considered and that other survey questions didn’t cover.
6. Did the training meet your expectations? Why or why not? Measuring participants’ satisfaction is an indication of their willingness to participate in future training courses. Matching the content and quality of the training to trainees’ expectations helps streamline your overall training system.

While these questions are effective for employee training, they can also be helpful in other training environments, such as continuing education courses.

Survey design templates

If you’d like to use an online survey to evaluate the effectiveness of your training, Jotform is here to help. Our more than 420 Jotform survey templates provide a proven system for gathering survey results. Choose a template that matches your needs, then customize it with your training survey questions, or use the Jotform Form Builder to build a survey from scratch.