Training and development opportunities at work are highly beneficial to both employers and employees. From an organizational perspective, offering professional development helps you ensure your workforce acquires the skills and knowledge needed to continuously improve their performance.
From an employee’s perspective, training sessions provide added confidence and even boost job satisfaction. In fact, employees value professional development opportunities at work so much that it actually factors into their decision about whether to stay in a job or more on — companies that create a strong culture of learning see their retention rates improve by 30–50 percent.
However, it’s not enough for your organization to simply offer learning and development opportunities. Those opportunities must match the needs of both your employees and your business. How can you ensure the training you’re offering will help you reach your company objectives while supporting employees in the way they want?
It all starts with pre-training survey questions. Organizations need to assess what their employees already know and what they need to learn in order to create and offer training that makes an impact.
Below, we take a closer look at what pre-training surveys are all about and why you should consider using them. We’ll also provide tips for creating an effective survey, share some sample pre-training survey questions, and introduce a survey software you can use to enhance the survey-making process.
As the name suggests, a pre-training survey is a survey an organization gives its employees in preparation for creating or selecting the training materials for a professional development session.
One of the main reasons to conduct a pre-training survey is to assess employees’ prior knowledge. This can help you determine what material the training needs to cover — without being redundant for the employees. It’s also a good way to determine what employees are expecting to learn from the training.
Pre-training surveys pave the way for creating better training opportunities — those that are highly relevant and focused on future growth. From an employee perspective, a pre-training survey offers them a way to voice any concerns they may have about the proposed training and its content, as well as its structure, location, and schedule.
To ensure your pre-training survey succeeds in gathering the data your organization needs, follow these survey best practices:
Here are some examples of pre-training survey questions to consider, broken down into four categories.
These types of questions are designed to ascertain how much employees already know about the training topic. With this information in hand, you can design your training to fill in the knowledge gaps without being repetitive. Here are some knowledge-based pre-training survey questions to consider:
These types of pre-training survey questions help you understand your employees’ expectations. While you can use this information to cater to your employees’ needs, you can also use it to set new expectations if their requirements aren’t aligned with organizational ones. Here are some examples of expectation-based pre-training survey questions:
There are many different learning styles in the workplace. Some employees learn better with visual aids, while others prefer to listen to instructions, for example. Before you design training, it’s beneficial to find out the different ways your employees learn so you can present the material in formats that are easy for everyone to understand. Here are some learning style-based pre-training survey questions to ask:
The date, time, and location of a training session is as important as the material or format. If employees can’t attend, then the material itself is irrelevant. So it’s vital to check in regarding any logistical issues or hurdles before scheduling a training session. Here are some examples of logistics-based pre-training survey questions:
Whether you need to develop pre-training surveys, post-training surveys, or other types of surveys, you can do it with Jotform.