* Finding out how training companies stack up against each other
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.
It also appears that KnowledgeAdvisors is pretty thorough in its research. According to its Microsoft case study, the researcher in 2001 “measured the training performance of every participant taking Microsoft training from all certified vendors … [MTM] is able to present the right survey, at the right time, to the right participant thousands of times per day to collect, process and report the results of hundreds of training events around the world instantaneously.” In addition, MTM is able to “automatically provide over 100 reports online to each individual learning provider, to all of its locations, and to all of its instructors. In this way, the learning providers received value from the process in a tool that helped them manage their business better and prove value to their end clients as well.”
If training providers care about the training they provide, shouldn’t this sort of information about them be transparent to their customers? Or perhaps KnowledgeAdvisors should make the data public. Chizzo says that the company has discussed such a plan for the past seven years but nothing has come to fruition. Without a means to easily view how one training provider stacks up against another, Chizzo says companies or individuals should ask their prospective training provider to describe their process of measuring the effectiveness of training among their students and how they compare to the industry average. Perhaps they’ll share their MTM results with you.
Of course, all this would be so much easier if such results were made public. As the reader who asked the original question commented: “Is it a secret? Or… who is hiding/protecting what or whom?”
What methods do you use to rate the different training providers?
