Training and Evaluation, Essay Example

Evaluation in a training process is soimportant that this has to be done carefully so that decisions can be based upon sound evidence. Those days have gone when the contribution of a training department was assessed by the number of days’ training carried out during the year, and with them most of the large training departments offering menus of courses. Now training departments are required to demonstrate how they benefit the organization. This requires a sophisticated system of evaluation.

Raymond A. Noe (2010, p. 232) referred threats to validity as “believability of the results” and “generalizability of the study results”. For example, consider the case where the training of sales representatives in an insurance company coincided with renewed public interest in life policies, and an upturn in the economy leading to increased earnings from the sale of policies. The extent to which training of sales representatives was responsible for increased sales revenue may be difficult to establish. Such difficulties are often referred to as threats to validity.

The evaluation must be internally valid before it can be externally valid(Goldstein, &Ford, 2002). If evaluation indicated that training was successful, and threats to internal validity were minimal, one would believe that the training was successful for that particular group. The next question is, “Will the training be effective for the rest of the employees slated to attend training?” External validity is the confidence that these findings will generalize to others who undergo the training.

The internal validity can be threatened by several factors. “History, maturation, regression, testing, and instrumentation are confounding factors” (Noe, 2010, p. 232)particularly likely to crop upin poorly controlled studies. Some issues unfavorably affect external validity. The external validity of some studies results increases as it applies to other people, places, and times(232).

Striving to maximize internal and external validity in every study remains a laudable goal, even if optimizing both can sometimes prove unrealistic in any particular study. Certain things can be done to improve and increase validity in general, depending on the evaluation of training. Pretests and posttests are one of the ways to improve validities of the study results. Noe (2010, p. 233) stressed to include “pretraining and posttraining measures” to achieve best results.Another methodology is to use“Random Assignment” (p. 233)in employees training. Such techniques can enhance prospects for internal validity and increase the ease and speed with which external validity can be achieved as well.

References

Noe, Raymond A. (2010)  Employee Training and Development. Fifth Edition. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Goldstein, Irwin L. and Ford, John Kevin. (2002).Training in Organizations: Needs Assessment, Development, and Evaluation. Northwestern University.