An innovative method and tool for role-specific quality-training evaluation

Abstract

A sound quality-training programme is the vehicle that ensures that all employees are adequately qualified to perform their jobs in accordance with applicable quality requirements. An effective quality-training programme is one that adequately addresses the varied training needs of employees in different roles in the organisation. Generally, it is not sufficient to administer the same training evaluation questionnaire to assess what all the attendees of a quality-training have learned. This is because, typically, employees receiving a quality-training are from different functional areas in the organisation, and thus have different vested interests and learning objectives. That is, a training audience is typically heterogeneous as opposed to homogeneous. Therefore, in such situations, training evaluations must be tailored to accommodate the unique needs of the various segments of the training audience, and to correctly ascertain whether the employees in each segment (or role) have learned what they need to know to directly apply in their specific jobs. The purpose of this paper is to address this critical need. Specifically, the contribution of this paper is that it proposes an innovative method and tool for performing role-specific evaluation of quality-training. A secondary notable benefit of this novel approach to training evaluation is that it may be used as an interactive trainer to help reinforce key concepts from the training.

Keywords:

• training needs assessment
• training evaluation
• quality-training
• role-specific quality-training
• training reinforcement

Notes

Note that this paper focuses on quality/process training needs only (see Section 2 in Table 1).

Alternatively, the required quality-training for an employee may be recorded only in the QSL Trainer and a reference may be included in the employee's training plan.

Here, level may refer to a department, or a specific role within a department.

This is an unfortunate situation which we occasionally encounter, although it is easy to catch by reviewing the time elapsed in taking a quiz. For example, it is suspicious if most students spend five minutes taking a particular quiz and another student takes the quiz in 15 seconds (which barely gives the person time to read all the questions, yet all the answers are correct!).