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ACCA Applied Knowledge · Business and Technology · Learning and training at work

A firm spent 40,000 on a sales training programme. Six months later, sales per head in the trained team rose, but sales also rose in an untrained comparison team because of a market upturn. Which approach would best help the firm isolate the effect of the training when evaluating results?

The firm should compare the trained team's improvement with the untrained control group's improvement. Because both groups benefited from the market upturn, the difference between them better isolates the training's effect. Satisfaction scores or total sales growth would not separate training from external influences.

  1. ARely on the delegates' satisfaction scores collected at the end of the course
  2. BCompare the improvement in the trained team against the improvement in the untrained control groupCorrect
  3. CCompare the trained team's sales with the training cost only
  4. DMeasure the total firm-wide sales increase and attribute it to training

Explanation

Using a control group allows the market upturn effect, which affects both teams, to be separated from the effect of training. Satisfaction scores measure only reaction, and attributing all growth to training ignores the external factor shown by the untrained team's improvement.

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