Key takeaways
- Ratings are vanity metrics. A 1–10 score never tells you what a real person from a real company valued — or why they showed up.
- Ask what they're taking with them. The most valuable takeaway becomes your proof points and your compass for the next session.
- Measure confidence, not content recall. Pair a pre-survey with a post question — "how confident do you feel doing X now?" — to see if the experience moved the needle.
- Improve the experience, not just the syllabus. Room temp, chairs, snack breaks, and screen visibility show up as often as content gaps — and they shape how training performs.
- Let learners name the next step. Asked options like "do this on my own," "attend another session," or "talk to someone from your team" give you real journey data instead of an assumed path.
Why this matters now
Most live training surveys end with a rating scale. The number looks measurable, but it rarely helps you redesign the program, choreograph the next session, or prove value to the business that paid for the training.
Matt Tidwell walks through the five questions he asks after every live session — the same ones he used after wrapping a training the week this video was published. The focus is practical instructional design for customer education and corporate training teams: shorter forms that return language you can act on.
The questions cover takeaways, confidence, experience improvements, next steps on the customer journey, and willingness to recommend. Together they give L&D and CE teams signal for content, ops, and marketing — including voice-of-customer lines for promoting future sessions.
What to do next
- Replace the rating-only form. Swap your end-of-session survey for these five questions (or a tight subset) before your next live training.
- Add a confidence pre/post pair. Ask experience level before the session and confidence after — so you measure movement, not a one-off score.
- Feed answers into journey and promo work. Use "what would you like to do next" in journey design conversations, and lift takeaway language into your next session invite.
- Subscribe on YouTube for more instructional design breakdowns: youtube.com/@itsmatttidwell
Full transcript
So, most folks have a survey at the end of their training, but it usually doesn't provide the business as much value as it could. So, I just wrapped a live training this week.
Here are the five questions I ask every participant in order to one, better improve my program, two, better choreograph future trainings, and three, to deliver the most value to the business or to the organization that I'm delivering training for. So, here we go.
Question number one. What's the most valuable thing you're taking from this session? Now, that may seem kind of obvious in a way, but a lot of training surveys that I've been a part of, if I've been a participant in the class, it's like rate this class on a scale of one to five or one to 10.
And it's like that rating is good for like a vanity metric or some sort of thing like that. But, it doesn't actually tell me that person from that company that came to my session valued this.
And if I can collect enough of those things, I can then understand like what's the motivation for people to actually really come to the training. Like I had an assumption when I put the training together, and I kind of tested that in a way, and registration started to validate those assumptions.
But, at the end of the session, the things that really stood out to people become my proof points and my compass to help me start to orient future sessions over time. I get to improve my programs, and then the business starts to get language directly from customers to promote future events.
The second thing I ask is, as a result of this session, because you were here, how confident do you feel using or doing blank? Whatever we just trained on. So, that might be a particular software, or that might be a workflow or process, or whatever it happens to be, but how confident do you feel?
And I want to see can I move the needle? And often I pair this question with a pre-survey. It's like, my experience level in doing blank is XYZ, you know?
So, I'll get a pre-number, and then I'll get this post-number, and I'll start to see like did this experience, not this content, but did the experience of being here move you into a more confident place to begin doing this sort of workflow, leverage this product, whatever that is.
Number three, what's one thing I can improve to make this session more useful?
And I like this question because it helps me like start to weed out like where did I think pieces of content were really important when they weren't, where did I think that the flow was good when it wasn't, uh what did I miss that I should have included, those sorts of things.
But more commonly, I'm just looking at some survey results here.
More commonly, I get things about like the humanity of the session like, you know, I really think this was great, but I could have used a snack break, or the AC in the room is a little cold, or the chairs were uncomfortable, or like whatever that happens to be.
And those play a real part, especially in live training, those play a real part in the person's experience and how well your training performs.
So, I like this what could we do to make this session more useful, not like what content would you like to see, because it's not about the content, it's about the experience, and experience is literally everything from the chair to the room temperature, to the lighting, to I couldn't see the monitor, all that sort of stuff plays a part here.
Next, I ask what would you like to do next, right?
So, I say, "Hey, like now that you've been through this experience, what's the best next step?" And I give them a couple of options like do more of this on my own, or I want to attend another session, or I want to talk to somebody from your team, or you know, whatever that happens to be, but I'll give them some options.
But I like this question because this helps me bring data to customer journey conversations. I think that a lot of times we make assumptions, which we have to to start, we have to make assumptions, but we have to iterate those assumptions.
And I think that especially in customer journeys, it's easy to become prescriptive and say like here's what a customer should do, versus listening to the motivations of the customer in them saying, "Here's what I want to do." And so, if we can get more data, training's just one small piece of this, but if we can get one point of data, we can start to build out, you know, real customer motivations on our real customer journey, and hopefully improve the overall experience as we go.
Finally, I say, "How likely are you to recommend this to a colleague?" So, I want to get a net promoter score. So, how likely are you to recommend this to a colleague? Scale of 1 to 10. That idea of like, "I enjoyed this so much.
Yeah, I would tell somebody else about this." Or, "Yeah, if they asked me about it, I would definitely encourage them." That idea of like, "I will help share this experience with others." is really, really important to me.
More than like, "Hey, I liked your content." It's like, "Okay, do you like it enough to actually go tell others about it? Would you actually recommend it if someone asked you?" And so, that's a huge piece. So, there you have it. That's my questions for the survey.
I think that the survey is one of those pieces that's easy to overlook. It's something you have to include, whatever that is, right?
But if you can tailor these questions, or even just steal mine, if you can take these questions and plug them into your learning experiences, I bet you're going to get a lot more data about how you can better organize, and orchestrate, and create live training experiences.
And I also think your business will get a ton of data about what is useful to your customers, what journey they want to see, and your marketing team's going to love you because you're going to have all of these statements from the voice of the customer about where they got the most value.
So, it's going to make promoting your future sessions even easier. All right, I'm out. If you like this type of content, click the subscribe button below, and I'll see you in the next one.