Study reveals another powerful benefit of employee training

The whole point of employee training is that it is supposed to make people better at their jobs, and multiple research studies bear out that it does.

But there’s also evidence that training makes people feel more proficient. And when people feel that they’re getting better at their job, their overall attitude — toward both training and the job itself — becomes more positive.

Attitudes toward training

The evidence we’re talking about comes from a study led by a professor at Salisbury University in Maryland. The research team surveyed 237 employees at four organizations — three companies and an academic institution — about their attitudes toward training and their own job proficiency.

The researchers asked participants to rate their attitudes toward training on a four-point scale, and do the same for their views of their proficiency at work. Analyzing the data, the researchers found a strong correlation between positive attitudes toward training and positive attitudes about job proficiency.

Here’s how the research paper put it: “(Our) calculations found strong significant associations between those employees who fully agreed that they had updated training and subsequent positive training attitudes, as well as a feeling of increased job proficiency.”

There was a similar correlation between those who said they’d benefited from effective coaching and those who felt highly proficient.

A multiplier effect

What to make of these findings?

Well, when someone feels good about their training and their ability to do their job, their appetite for further training and greater proficiency increases. It’s a sort of virtuous cycle. As the researchers put it, “Training is seen to be so important in forming positive attitudes that it may further lead to job proficiency.”

So the next time you’re weighing a decision about whether to invest in employee training, remember that you may get much more out of it than a discrete boost in performance associated with that training.

This blog entry is based on the following research study: Truitt, D. (2011) The Effect of Training and Development on Employee Attitude as it Relates to Training and Work Proficiency. Sage Open, 1(3).