How to measure the effectiveness of faculty training and development

A higher education institution’s success depends on the skills, performance, and engagement of its faculty members. That’s why faculty training and development initiatives can be among an institution’s most impactful investments. Many institutions are investing more financial resources into faculty development each year. However, evaluating a faculty development program requires reliable methods for measuring its outcomes. Learn how to measure faculty training success to maximize your institution’s return on investment (ROI) from faculty professional development.

Why invest in faculty professional development?

Faculty professional development benefits institutions in several ways, including:

Enhancing teaching skills: Professional development initiatives can help faculty enhance their teaching skills. Whether the training programs cover new teaching methodologies or soft skills, lecturers can become better equipped to support student success through professional development.
Improving educational outcomes: As faculty members improve their teaching skills, educational outcomes are sure to follow. Students develop a deeper understanding of their course material when their lecturers excel.
Increasing student engagement: Through professional development opportunities, faculty members can learn interaction models for enhancing student engagement in sessions.
Boosting faculty engagement: Professional development opportunities are also vital for keeping faculty engaged and satisfied with their work. Knowing that they have opportunities to improve their skills and advance their careers can be a major motivator.
Attracting and retaining top faculty: The prospect of professional development opportunities can help draw top faculty to your institution. These opportunities can also help retain talent, whereas a lack of development opportunities is a common reason employees resign.

Why measure faculty training effectiveness?

While many institutions see the value of faculty professional development, they often lack a rigorous approach to measuring the impact of their training programs. This could be because they’re unsure how to measure training effectiveness, but some administrators are still unconvinced of how important faculty training and development measurement systems are. Measuring the success of training initiatives is crucial for institutions wanting to:

Maximize training ROI: Training programs come with expenses, including intellectual property, facilitation fees, time costs, and sometimes accommodation or catering. While the lasting benefits of a quality training program can justify these costs, institutions need to assess which programs offer the greatest return on investment.
Align training with goals: Each training program has a distinctive purpose, and choosing the right ones for your faculty depends on your institutional goals. Measuring training effectiveness allows administrators to check whether a program is driving progress toward these goals or not.
Identify knowledge gaps: Measuring training program results can highlight areas that have yet to see improvement. These knowledge gaps could include teaching methodologies, educational technologies, or soft skills. No training program can enhance all skills and knowledge areas equally, so the gaps left after one development opportunity could become focus areas for the next.
Enhance participant engagement: Tracking training effectiveness can reveal how well faculty members are engaging with training program content. If engagement is high, measurement should show that they have retained and can apply key learnings. These insights can help your institution adapt training content and presentation styles to improve engagement levels in future sessions.
Promote continuous improvement: Effective professional development programs help create a culture of continuous improvement among faculty members at your institution. Measuring training effectiveness and refining programs based on performance data further enhances this culture, making administrators and other faculty members partners in growth.

How to measure training effectiveness

If your institution is ready to start measuring training effectiveness or improve your existing system for training success measurement, you can do so through a four-step process.

1. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs)

To develop an approach for measuring training success, your institution must define what success means for a given program. Aim to narrow the focus to a few institutional goals, and identify measurable data points that would reveal whether the training program is achieving those goals. These data points are your key performance indicators (KPIs) for faculty professional development. KPIs to measure could include:

Training attendance rate: If you use an LMS for your faculty training programs, this data should be easy to access. You can break down attendance further into signups across all training, attendees per training course, attendees per session, and attendance records for each participant. These data points can reveal faculty members who need more support, courses that need better marketing, and courses that may be underdelivering — leading to attendance drop-offs over time.
Training completion rate: This refers to the portion of faculty members starting the training that finish it. For training programs with multiple sessions, this KPI shows whether the training keeps participants engaged from one session to the next. Low completion rates could indicate a failure to meet expectations. Ensure faculty members know what training will be like, what they’ll learn, and how it fits with their daily workload. If the training aligns with these expectations, attendees are likely to persist.
Average time to completion: This training efficiency KPI reveals how long the average participant takes from signing up for a course to completing it. This KPI is most meaningful for self-paced learning, where slower times to completion could reveal a range of issues. These might include a lack of perceived value from the course, time-management concerns, or poor support. Each of these issues requires a different response, but time to completion is a useful prompt for further investigation.
Post-training assessment results: Post-training assessments can be powerful measuring tools, and their results are vital KPIs for administrators. Strong results indicate faculty members are internalizing lessons from training. Weaker results often suggest a need to improve training quality. The value of this KPI depends on how well-designed your assessments are.
Participant satisfaction rate: You can gauge this KPI through surveys that elicit a satisfaction rating along with open-ended answers about what participants liked and disliked. Open-ended questions and questions about satisfaction with specific components of the training can help improve the training experience for future cohorts. Satisfaction often correlates with retention, attendance of future courses, and application of learnings.
Student outcomes: This KPI is significant when training relates to teaching skills and methods. Improved teaching should yield higher grades, increased student retention rates, and boosted engagement.
Job performance impact: This is a broad, but important KPI. Refine it to track measurable performance changes after the training in areas the training covered. For example, if the training addressed presentation skills for lecturers, you could measure this KPI through student feedback in response to course evaluation questions about the lecturer’s in-class presentations.
Training ROI: Calculating an estimated ROI from each training program is useful for financial planning and justifying further investment by institutional decision-makers. Assign an estimated financial value to training outcomes like improved student retention and course ratings. To calculate ROI over a given period, subtract the training costs from the estimated financial gains over that period to arrive at the training’s net profit. Then divide the net profit by the training spend to get the ROI.

2. Choose and administer assessment methods

With a clear view of your KPIs, you can prepare assessments to track them. Forms of assessment can involve direct measurement of knowledge and skills, as well as indirect measurement of the training experience. Common faculty training assessment methods include:

Pre- and post-training evaluations: Evaluating faculty members before and after a training course illuminates the training’s impact. These evaluations should test how well faculty members know the subject matter before the sessions compared to afterward. But they can also assess how a training course has influenced the faculty member’s interest, motivation, and attitudes.
Peer assessments: Peer evaluations allow faculty members to get feedback on their improved knowledge and skills from colleagues who understand their teaching context. Evaluating another faculty member’s understanding can also help solidify a faculty member’s own learnings.

Student feedback: Student surveys and course evaluations can reveal how well faculty members apply their learnings in the classroom. Ensure your student survey question selection reflects areas covered in faculty training programs to leverage this assessment method.

3. Monitor faculty performance

Effective training should have lasting, tangible impacts on faculty member performance. Department heads and program deans should monitor how training participants perform after completing courses by looking at their student outcomes, evaluations, work ethic, and engagement. Assessments and evaluations are useful quantitative tools, but qualitative insights from peers and leaders after training are also meaningful. Extended monitoring is essential to tracking training ROI and supporting faculty success.

Along the way, knowledge and skill gaps may emerge that future training can fill. Leaders, peers, and mentors can also initiate candid conversations with faculty members about their training experiences and how they are applying them.

4. Monitor continued learning

The most effective training programs inspire faculty members to pursue continuous improvement. This growth mindset is a powerful asset for career progress and may improve signup rates for future professional development opportunities. Ongoing monitoring of faculty performance and continued learning allows you to measure the impact of your institution’s overall approach to professional development beyond individual training courses. Plus, when a growth mindset shows in tangible actions like signing up for further institutional or self-directed learning opportunities, it is valuable evidence of continuous faculty improvement for accreditation processes.

Best practices for measuring training effectiveness

With appropriate KPIs and training evaluation tools, your institution is ready to succeed at faculty training impact measurement. But implementing a few additional best practices can help you gain the clearest view of each training program’s ROI and maximize training effectiveness.

Identify your KPIs first: Knowing your KPIs before measuring training effectiveness is essential. But it’s ideal to know them before you even develop or choose a training course. Training could be effective at achieving its design without being effective for your institutional goals. Your institution will get the most value from implementing and measuring training when starting with clear goals and KPIs that demonstrate progress toward those goals.
Have a reasonable number of KPIs: KPI quantity can be almost as important as KPI quality. Identifying multiple relevant KPIs helps paint a comprehensive picture of a professional development program’s effectiveness. More KPIs can mean more data and more insights. However, too many KPIs cloud the picture by obscuring which indicators are key for decision-making. Experiment with adding or removing KPIs to find your sweet spot. The right number of KPIs can also vary across programs.
Plan your data collection schedule: Measuring training impact is a part of the training cycle and can become part of regular institutional life. But this requires scheduling to ensure measurement happens at the optimal time. Build pre-training, post-training, and ongoing training success evaluations into departmental calendars to optimize measurement for actionable insights.
Customize your evaluation framework: Training evaluations can gauge participant attitudes, learnings, behaviors, and outcomes through a variety of methods. But efficiency demands adapting your evaluation framework to use the most relevant tools and measuring the most important indicators for each training. For example, student surveys are useful for evaluating teaching skills, while peer feedback is more relevant after training faculty in academic research and writing.
Leverage software: Higher education software can enhance the efficiency and accuracy of your training effectiveness measurement process. You can rely on cutting-edge software to distribute evaluations, grade assessments, track faculty performance, monitor student outcomes, and analyze KPI data.
Act on your insights: The value of training effectiveness measurement lies in the decisions it drives. As data comes to light and you arrive at conclusions by analyzing it, plan to take the next impactful step. Depending on what your evaluations reveal, this could mean adapting the current training program or pivoting to a new one. Strategic decisions, backed by solid data, will maximize your long-term results from professional development initiatives.