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Training people is what churches do. And, churches that strive for excellence, understand the importance of training their members, volunteers, and employees.
A training evaluation form can help you assess the effectiveness of these important educational sessions.
Each of these vital church stakeholders has different training needs – but all want to learn.
For instance, church members may be encouraged to attend a church membership class or participate in spiritual enrichment classes.
Volunteers may participate in a volunteer orientation as well as job-specific skill development.
Church employees have different training needs and should be oriented on things like policies and procedures, customer service skills, or perhaps computer software.
For instance, if you hire a church secretary, they will need to learn how to use church-related software programs.
Regardless, training is crucial for all areas of the church, and creating a great training experience is important to engaging members, volunteers, and employees.
Ministries that develop training should be constantly looking for ways to improve their classes.
They understand that this continuous evaluation can help to improve class content, the way in which a class is presented, and learning outcomes.
Why Is It Important to Evaluate the Training That You Do?
Most churches use internal experts to present training material
Using internal experts benefits everyone. Training by internal experts can be used to develop leaders by providing an opportunity for them to think through the training curriculum and practice presenting and teaching information.
Since training is only as good as it is presented and absorbed, it is important to solicit feedback on how members, volunteers, and employees perceived the training and its effectiveness.
An effective training evaluation form can help to identify strengths in the class, weaknesses in the content, and the training method or presentation.
Understanding class strengths and weaknesses can be used to make changes to improve the class.
10 Questions That Will Help
Evaluate Your Training
Did you understand the objective of the training? Students need to go into a training session with an understanding of what it is the training hopes to achieve. In other words, what is it that the student will know or be able to do after completing the training?
At the end of the training, did you feel like those learning objectives were met? The student should be able to articulate how the training helped them learn practical information or an applicable skill.
Was the information helpful? All too often we sit through training sessions that provide lots of information but are not necessarily helpful information for the task at hand.
Was the presentation organized and easy to understand? Most students come from different backgrounds and not all have the same life experiences. Training content should be easy to understand and presented for the lowest common denominator. For instance, if you are offering a class on complex theological concepts, make sure your audience has a basic understanding of the Bible.
Did the class provide content that you can apply immediately? Let’s assume you have an in-house expert on Excel software. You want to be sure that the training material has practical application for the students in the session.
Was the class the right length of time? We live in a fast-paced world and training is no different. Classes should include all necessary information that is taught in understandable bite-sized pieces of information.
Were you satisfied with this class? No one wants to waste someone’s time. Make sure students are satisfied with the training and if they aren’t, you need to find out why.
Will you recommend this class to others? Word of mouth is the most effective way to get class participation. The goal is to have students tell others that the class was a good use of their time.
Will you attend future classes? Another goal of a successful class is to have students who will participate in future training opportunities.
What would change to make the class better? This is a loaded question but can provide insight into the training that you may not have otherwise gotten. For instance, a student may shed light on new technologies that could enhance the training experience.
These are basic questions that can be customized to any in-house training and can be formatted in a word document for a professional presentation.
If you are a member, you can log in to access an edible copy of a training evaluation form here.
If you are not a member but would like an editable copy of a training evaluation form document that you can customize for your church, click here.
Or, if you like to do things electronically, there are many tools on the market that can help with this.
Technology is constantly evolving and there are many free tools to gather this type of feedback.
Google Forms is one that I’ve used. It’s simple to set up and you are able to get the feedback you are looking for by simply sending students an email with the survey.
Regardless of the questions that you ask or the method, it is important to know that the training your team is investing time and resources in is truly providing the results that you had hoped for.
Does your church evaluate the effectiveness of classes for members, volunteers, and employees?
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