Key Metrics you need to know to measure the effectiveness of your On-Site Trainings

By Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP®, PMI-ACP, Chief Cheetah and Founder of Cheetah Learning

Project Managers, and especially certified Project Managers, know first-hand the value of quality training for their own professional development and effectiveness. Being a PMP, after all, requires PMs to pursue ongoing education to maintain their credential. The Project Management Institute’s recent Pulse of the Profession report further confirms the value of PM training; in their 2015 study, they found that “80 percent of high-performing organisations offer ongoing training for project managers.”

Training isn’t valuable only for individual employees, then; it improves the performance of a whole organisation.

Project Managers also know, however, that not all training programs are created equal. How, then, can organisations and their leaders evaluate the quality and effectiveness of the trainings they offer? Here at Cheetah Learning, training evaluations ultimately need to measure real-world results. For Project Management training, we find that two of the most important metrics of training effectiveness are bottom-line financial measures and exam pass rates of employees. We’ll explore these in the case of Cheetah’s own evaluation of the effectiveness of one of its most popular courses: its Cheetah Exam Prep® for PMP® Exam program held on-site for corporate clients.

 

First Metric: Bottom-Line Financial Measures

To evaluate how well our on-site PMP training helps the financial bottom line of our corporate clients, Cheetah tracks the profitability and growth rates of these organisations. Since we have provided regular trainings for many of our publicly traded corporate clients for ten years or more, we were able to examine the historical data on their organisation’s profitability and growth alongside the on-site trainings we provided to that organisation each year based on their publicly available annual reports. We were not surprised to find that 90% of Cheetah corporate clients increased their profitability and that 85% of them increased their growth rate in the year immediately following retaining Cheetah Learning for their on-site PM training needs.

Regardless of the type of training program your organisation brings on board, measuring the long-term effects on your company’s profitability and growth is crucial to evaluating that training’s effectiveness. This metric is most reliable when you are able to measure the effectiveness of training programs offered regularly over a long period of time.

 

Second Metric: Exam Pass Rates

A second, crucial metric that we here at Cheetah use to measure the effectiveness of our on-site accelerated PMP prep program is perhaps the most obvious: how many employees who go through our program actually pass the exam (and pass it the day after they complete the course). To track this, we keep in close contact with all of our program alumni to find out if they passed the exam and what their next career moves are. This is built into our program, as we refund the money of those who do not pass. Through these efforts, we have found that while the first-try pass rate for the Project Management Professional (PMP)® exam is estimated to be approximately 60 percent, 98 percent of students who go through Cheetah Learning’s Cheetah Exam Prep® for PMP® Exam program pass the test.

Even if your training program does not culminate in an exam like the PMP, you can still use an exam format to measure the training’s effectiveness. Good trainers could (and should) end their program with a knowledge assessment to see how well employees that went through their program assimilated the information presented.

The types of metrics you choose to evaluate the effectiveness of your organisation’s training programs will, of course, depend on the trainings your organisation uses. But regardless of whether these are high-stakes trainings that require employees to pass a globally recognised certification exam where everyone’s reputation is at stake (including the organisation’s), or lower-stakes trainings focused on soft skills, measuring the effectiveness of training programs is the best way to know which trainings are adding value to your organisation – and which need to be either improved or eliminated.

 

To learn more about Cheetah Learning’s on-site Cheetah Exam Prep® for PMP® Exam program and how to bring this award-winning training to your organization, contact the company at (888) 659-2013 or info@cheetahlearning.com.

 

 

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