Reducing Costs and Increasing Training Quality
With Strategic Testing
by Steven B. Just

Prove the value of training!
Demonstrate training ROI!
Show a correlation between training and corporate profits!
Justify your training budget to senior management!
You should be spending more money on leadership development, not less!

Desperate times breed desperate attempts to justify why you need to keep your training budget from being cut (if not actually getting it increased!). But let’s be realistic: Most companies view training as a cost center not a profit center, and if 20% of your workforce is being let go and your stock price has dropped by 30% it is highly unlikely that senior executives in your company are spending a lot of time thinking about how much to increase your training budget.

So, what to do? How can you maintain the quality of your training while spending less money? May we suggest some strategic testing?

When most trainers think of testing they think of the summative variety (testing after a learning experience). But there’s also the formative variety (testing before and during a learning experience). You can test strategically to streamline and improve your training programs. Let’s look at a few examples:

Does everyone need to be trained in lockstep?
We know that learners enter training programs with different levels of knowledge (entering behaviors). You can use diagnostic testing for training placement (this works especially well with eLearning, but is more problematic with instructor-led training), saving time from your training programs. Some learners might be able to place out of a course altogether.

Guarantee mastery with objectives-based testing.
Most tests are given with a single passing score. But the ultimate goal of corporate testing is mastery of a domain of content. It is possible to attain a high score on a test but still have unmastered content domains. As we previously (September, 2008) wrote:

Let’s assume you have a 100 question “classic” test where the passing score is 90%. Let’s further assume that those 100 questions are drawn evenly from 10 objectives. This means it is possible (though perhaps not likely) for a student to get ALL of the questions wrong in one of the objectives and still pass the test! It is certainly possible, and perhaps even likely, that a student scoring at or just about passing for the test as a whole will have some serious weaknesses on one or more objectives.

Testing by objective works particularly well for module-level tests within a mastery learning strategy. It enables learners to proceed through the material at their own pace while guaranteeing mastery of ALL of the learning objectives.

Use high stakes testing to quickly identify possible poor performers.
This isn’t pleasant and it has to be done properly to avoid legal jeopardy, but isn’t it best to identify new employees who might not have the potential to succeed in your company sooner rather than later? If a new employee going through an initial training program cannot demonstrate job-required competency, use high stakes testing to find out as quickly as possible.

Use testing to improve your training programs.
By reviewing question level data from test results you can determine if your learning materials (or instructors) are conveying incorrect information or correct information in a confusing manner to the learners. Look for questions with high difficulty levels compared to the test scores as a whole. Look for questions that negatively discriminate against the stronger students. Study the choice distribution of the questions and look for incorrect choices that are frequently selected.

Bottom line: Proper use of strategic testing can reduce training costs while increasing learning quality.