Advice for Manual Handling trainers – Make sure you monitor and evaluate!

It’s all very well updating your training methodologies, but if you’ve got no evaluation process in place you have no idea of what’s working and what isn’t.

Make sure you build a robust review system involving both management and operative/worker feedback.

This should run concurrently with each stage of the programme. OFI suggests that this dynamic review process should begin at the outset of the programme and remain a constant core component throughout the entire programme cycle and beyond, to assess the longevity of effectiveness and gauge where possible further action is required.

Manage the quality of your training through delegate feedback – The People Have Spoken!

A well designed feedback form completed by each attendee at the end of a manual handling practical skills training session is, in OFI’s experience, one of the most effective and useful  methods of collecting evaluation feedback from training courses. This simple, easy to collect feeback provides quality monitoring and a measurement of a participant’s reaction and satisfaction with their training.

Damon Peterson, OFI’s Director of training, commented: “Gathering evaluation feedback from courses is OFIs key method of monitoring the quality of our training.”

Management are usually keen for prompt meaningful feedback from delivered training courses, but it is our belief that course evaluations are also an invaluable quality management tool for the training provider.  Damon Peterson noted that “the way we do this is through OFI’s  dedicated course development team’ this, he says ‘provides a critical ‘real time’ monitoring tool for all of our scheduled courses that can feed back information to make further improvements to the design and delivery of courses and forms an integral part of OFI’s overall quality monitoring system”’

The key to analysing feedback from courses is ensuring that information gathered is analysed quickly. At OFI we use an advanced IT Customer Relationship Management System that has the ability to collate and produce rapid on-going feedback of course evaluations but there is no reason why an efficient dedicated administration team could not achieve similar results.

Research in the area of course evaluation indicates that the questions posed to attendees of courses/sessions are also key in providing quality information which can be fed back into the continuous improvement process. Research shows that certain questions have more value than others in this respect. For example, the responses to the following have proved to be invaluable:

• Relevance to the role of attendees
• Importance to the role of attendees
• Whether the attendee would recommend the course to colleagues
• How the attendee will apply what they have learned back to their work-place.

Our team’s extensive experience of utilising various methods of collecting and analysing course evaluations has made us aware that “one solution does not fit all” and the evaluation process should be tailored to meet a client requirements prior to  running a training course programme.

In this blog series, our expert trainers share their experience and show you how to make your manual handling courses more engaging.

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1. Introduction (Advice for Manual Handling trainers – How to make your courses more engaging).
2. Tailor your course to fit your audience.
3. Apply the ‘Stages of Change’ model to your training. 
4. Make your course material engaging & mix up your training methods.
5. Personalise your training with anecdotes and case studies.
6. Explain the ‘why’ behind the ‘how’.
7. Make ‘practical’ a key component of your training.
8. Follow up your training with feedback and course evaluation. (this page)