Should employers be involved in evaluating learners?

The short answer is: yes.  

And there are 3 main reasons why.  

1. So companies know how well their staff are performing.  
2. So employees know if they're reaching their learning goals.  
3. So companies can track the effectiveness of their learning programmes.  

To do all this, employers need to have their management staff involved in the evaluation process.  

Most companies have annual appraisals to evaluate staff performance, so they have the information they need pay rises, promotions or difficult conversations. This is a perfectly good way to evaluate employees, but it doesn't drill down into evaluating learning. Learning isn't something that takes place once a year, it happens every day.  

Whether your staff are completing official programmes - like apprenticeships - they're learning new skills all the time. This means employers need to make a conscious effort to help their employees record, track and evaluate learning.  

Employers need to make it easy for staff to record their learning, so it's available for them to evaluate. Why? Because continuous evaluation brings huge benefits for your business and your employees.  

Identify skills gaps

Managers who evaluate their employee's learning on a regular basis know exactly what skills they have in their department - and what skills they still need to develop. This means they can plan learning in a strategic way to meet the needs of the business.  

Reward and recognition 

By evaluating learners, managers can see exactly how their staff are getting on - the small details and the big picture. This will help them recognise a range of achievements - from learning a new skill to completing a qualification - so staff feel encouraged to work towards their next goal and achieve the next reward.  

Increase skills development  

Employees who receive regular encouragement and have regular evaluations are more engaged in their learning journey. They're motivated to do more, learn more and achieve more - which is great for productivity and skills development in your department. 

Build connections  

You could just get your HR team or employee's tutor to evaluate their learning, but you'll miss out on all the insight it can bring. By evaluating learning records and live data, employers have the information they need to make meaningful evaluations about their employee's work. It doesn't take long, and it'll help you build strong connections with your employees. 

Track effectiveness of learning programmes

Setting staff learning programmes is all well and good, but how do you know if they're having an impact? By evaluating employee learning on a scorecard, you can see the impact it's having on their skills development. You can then use these scores to measure the effectiveness of programmes across the business.  

With Onefile, playing an active role in employee engagement isn't time-consuming - employers can do it at the touch of a button.  

Onefile's learning software has loads of built-in features to make evaluation easy - like employer dashboards, feedback boxes, scorecards and collaboration tools. With Onefile, employers, employees and tutors can work together to evaluate learning in a collaborative, transparent and effective way.  

To see Onefile's easy evaluation in action, download our free guide.