I'm sure we can all relate to exceptional dullness of those old school workplace trainings, typically required on the first day of a new job. They're usually related to policy, look like they were filmed in the 1980s and tend to aggressively apply awful alliteration. Now, don't get me wrong, I love a bit of nostalgia, but do they really do help? Surely, corporate trainings must have some benefit, especially if they're job relevant and not just busy-work on your first day, right?
Well, let's make a quick distinction: I'm sure you could put a solid ROI on the compliance trainings, these limit liabilitis and probably save most companies quite a bit in the long-term. But what about trainings geared towards employee development and growth? Again, I'm sure you could find a lot of anecdotal support for trainings offered in the workplace, but can we quantify and generalize that?
In theory, these trainings should result in new skills, awareness of current trends in a given field, increased expsoure to the business for employees outside of operations and even networking/collaboration opportunities. In terms of measureable impacts, these trainings should positively impact an individual's performance (again, theoretically). If nothing else, they should give employees a sense of growth and positively impact engagement. I'm going to test this to see what impact, if any, a company training has on these two metrics.
Please note: While the results interpretation here is based on real-world experience, the data used for this analysis is synthetic.