Praxis Paper 30. Monitoring and Evaluating Training: Challenges, opportunities and recommendations

Do training courses really make any difference to people’s ability to do their jobs or to the quality of their work? How can we know? Can the process of monitoring and evaluating these courses improve training effectiveness? Does pressure from donors help or hinder the process? These are challenging but important questions for training providers, civil society organisations and donors alike.

Written from the perspective of the training provider, the first part of this paper compiles the major challenges and identifies four key questions we need to ask ourselves before deciding how (and whether) to monitor and evaluate training interventions. It then explores the what, when and why to evaluate, as well as who to involve, before moving on to offering a critical overview of commonly used approaches and frameworks for M&E of training. The final part of the paper then suggests a newly developed set of steps for approaching each stage of the process in ensuring training impact.