Education & training
Training feedback survey
Ask whether the training can be used on Monday, not whether the room was comfortable.
Why this survey gets sent
“Every course I run scores four point something out of five, and six weeks later I cannot point at one thing anybody does differently. The sheet tells me people enjoyed the day. I am not paid for that.”
A happy sheet measures the room. What a training budget is defended with is transfer: whether a person left with something they can apply, and whether what stopped them was the pace, the materials or their own manager. Those are separate statements, and one grid asks all of them in a single screen.
What is in it
- The training title and the date you attended
- Five statements, from strongly disagree to strongly agree
- Objectives, the trainer, the pace, the materials, applying it at work
- The most useful thing you learned (long answer)
- What you would change about it (long answer)
- The topics you would like next (multiple choice)
About 4 min to answer
Training feedback survey
About 4 min
How to write this survey
Ask about the application, not the atmosphere
Almost every training sheet ends up measuring the day: the room, the refreshments, whether the trainer was likeable. None of that survives contact with a budget meeting. The statement that does is “I can apply this in my work” — it is the only line on the page that predicts anything, and it is the line to read first when the results arrive.
Write each statement so that a low score names its own repair. “The pace was right” points at the timetable; “the materials were useful” points at the handbook; “the objectives were clear” points at the invitation that went out a fortnight earlier. A statement nobody can act on is a statement that only produces an average.
Separate the trainer from the training
A trainer and a curriculum are two different purchases, and mixing them costs you both answers. A fine presenter can be sent out to deliver material that was wrong for the audience, and a thin session can be rescued by somebody who reads a room. Keep “the trainer explained things well” as its own line, so a weak score sends you to the right conversation.
Resist naming the trainer in the question when the group is small. In a room of eight, “rate your trainer” beside a required comment box is a survey people answer politely; the same five statements with no name attached come back sharper. Where the trainer is external and the contract is up for renewal, say plainly that the answers feed the purchasing decision — that lifts the response rate and the candour together.
Two open boxes, pulling opposite ways
Two open questions are enough, and they should face in opposite directions: one asks for the thing that worked, the other for the thing to change. “Any other comments?” instead returns either silence or a complaint about the parking, because a reader with no question in front of them writes about whatever is nearest.
“What was the most useful thing you learned?” does a second job besides collecting text: answering it forces the participant to name one thing, which is itself the first rehearsal of using it. The sentences that come back are also the only quotable material you will have when somebody asks what the day bought — an average of four point two quotes nothing.
Send it in the room, and again six weeks later
Hand it out before the room empties. A link on the last slide, a QR code on the table, five minutes given back from the session — that is the difference between a response rate around two thirds and one around a seventh, and the seventh is never a random sample: it is the delighted and the furious.
Then send the same survey again six weeks later carrying one question only: what have you actually used? Those answers are worth more than the whole sheet collected on the day, because on the day everybody intends to apply it. Keep the wording identical between the two rounds so both sets of numbers can sit in one column.
The question that plans next quarter
The list of topics for next time is the cheapest planning instrument an organisation owns. It costs the respondent four seconds and arrives sorted by demand, from people who have just spent a day thinking about their own gaps. Offer a short list of real options rather than an empty box — a box returns thirty different wordings of the same three courses.
Keep the list to what you could genuinely run in the next two quarters. A topic offered and never delivered is remembered, and the second time you ask, the same people answer more carefully or not at all. If something cannot be scheduled, leave it off the list and let the open box carry it.