What Is Follow-up on Trainings?

Successful training events always integrate follow-up to provide further support, skill
development, and continuous improvement to promote new practise. Trainers responsible for
the training plans will benefit from this discussion of the need for a connexion between new
learning and a process of ongoing learning and feedback. This is important especially for
further development of solid teaching practise and approaches to supervision (KNAPP-
PHILO 2007). Whereas evaluation of the training course takes place during the training
itself, follow-up on trainings comes after the training and is often combined with quality
control assessment (see figure).

Follow-up process embedded in training events. Source: LOOMIS (2007)

Important Dimensions of a Training Follow-up

(Adapted from RAE 2004)

An effective follow-up phase includes several dimensions:

1. Determining what the participants have learned during the course

2. Giving the learners time to reflect on their learning prior to their completion of the
post-training personal action plan

3. Getting useful feedback in an organised manner to help with future training planning

4. Ensuring trainees and learners follow up their training with relevant actions to apply,
improve, develop and reinforce learning attained.
Examples of Follow-up on Trainings

1. Ask each participant to email you a brief summary of the three most important points
they learned in the training. Let a few weeks pass and then email the responses to the
group, along with any additional feedback that has occurred in the meantime. This
will give you an opportunity to reinforce what was learned a second time.

2. Send out a quiz related to the training’s content several weeks after the initial session.
Post the responses and award a prize for the “best” answers. The quiz can be either
multiple choice or free answer.

3. A week after the training, ask participants what new skill or technique they have tried
based on the materials covered in the training. When appropriate, post the anecdotes
in a public place or mass email. Be sure to solicit feedback as to what worked well,
what did not go as smoothly, and what additional training is needed.

4. At the close of the training, ask each participant to commit to trying 1-3 new skills
from the program. Ask them to write them down, and let them know that the group
will get back together to follow up and discuss techniques tried. Next, schedule a
follow-up session. You may want to facilitate this meeting yourself or bring back the
program’s trainer. Be an active partner in the training process. Remember, people gain
new skills when they see others doing the same, when they see value in those skills,
and when motivated with incentives to do so.

5. You can organise a “keep on doing” session. To do this, you could invite your
participants to exchange what they have done after the training (e.g. a year after the
training has taken place). Let them tell whether the training was useful or not useful
for their career. This will also engage the fellow trainees to work further.

6. The other way to do the follow-up is to get help of internet platforms. Create a
platform and invite participants to join it. Initiate discussions regarding the topic and
thereby keep in touch with the activities they are doing.

Benefits of Follow-up on Trainings

 Further measure effectiveness of training

 Long-term evaluation: Measure change in behaviour, knowledge and attitudes

 Quality control: Make sure that participants are implementing correctly

 Solicit additional feedback on training

  Provision additional training

 Answers questions and clarifies original lessons

 Gives more specific advice and more relevant demonstrations

 Follow-up on action plan

 Check benchmarks and milestones in action plan

Applicability

As mentioned before, it is very useful for learners, trainers and future training planning to
implement a follow-up. However, it is not always easy to conduct a follow-up, especially
when participants and trainers meet only once for a training course and then go back to their
work in different contexts (maybe even in different countries). Even if the follow-up is done
only by mail or over the internet, it can be difficult to motivate the learners to contribute to a
reliable follow-up. Under these circumstances, you have to make sure that you invest enough
time and resources in implementing an appropriate evaluation during the training course, but
still give participants the opportunity to make use of a follow-up if they wish to do so.

Executive Summary

Follow-up is essential in all training situations as it provides participants with further support
and skill development. Also, follow-up improves existing trainings as well as future training
plans. The lecturers get a feedback on what the participants actually learned during the
training, whereas the participants have the opportunity to reflect on their learning a second
time.

Advantages

 Determining the learning outcomes of the training

 Assessing the results and reinforcing the key points
 Providing the learners time to reflect on their learning
 Getting useful feedback which supports future trainings
 Determining what kind of retraining is needed

Disadvantages

 Requires time and resources investment

 Participants may not be willing to contribute to the follow-up after the training
 Difficult to set up when people meet only once and have no further connection to each
other
 Difficulties to capture a comprehensive follow-up when it is only possible by mail