Is there an independent company that provides ratings of training providers – a sort of Consumer Reports of the IT training industry? That was a question that I recently received from a reader who is an IT manager with a construction company. I thought it would be an easy enough question to answer but after asking a number of training providers and a recruiter, I couldn’t pinpoint a company that provided just that. Even the reader couldn’t find anything after a couple of hours searching the Web.

The training providers I spoke to could only point me to KnowledgeAdvisors, a research company based in Chicago, that offers a service that is somewhat close to what the reader was looking for.

The reader wrote: “Who really has close links to OEMs and works hard to keep up-to-date with the OEM expectations? Who really works at developing their staff from people who have good, real world, field experience? And what is the record of these training companies to stand by what they promise? How many students have been successful? How many if any complaints and what percentage of their total enrollment is that per year? And for how many years has this information been tracked?”

KnowledgeAdvisors is contracted by vendors, such as Microsoft and Cisco, to measure the effectiveness of their learning partners as part of its service called Metrics that Matter (MTM). KnowledgeAdvisors surveys the partners’ students soon after they’ve taken training, and a follow-up survey is taken at 60 days after training. The questions are designed to gauge the student’s experience of the training, how relevant it was to their jobs, and if it improved their job performance.

The findings are presented to the vendor, which can see how their training providers stack up against each other. The vendor can also make the data available to their training partners, and so it’s worthwhile for you to ask your training company if they would share with you their results from the MTM survey, suggests Sara Chizzo, senior director of enterprise solutions at KnowledgeAdvisors. According to Chizzo, KnowledgeAdvisors is well known among training companies – it cites New Horizons and Global Knowledge as customers on its Web site - so I guess familiarity with KnowledgeAdvisors by training providers is a good sign that they care about providing effective learning.

Jon Brodkin is senior writer at Network World.