The Efficacy of Training for Employees in the Spanish Public Administration: Comparing Classroom Training to eLearning

Training activities in on-line mode are becoming more common, not only in educational institutions, but also in companies and public administrations. Declining investment in continuing education by the Spanish organizations is forcing many of them to resort to on-line platforms; however, the suitability of this modality to learn and transfer to the job has not been studied in depth.

This article aims to analyze the degree of transfer of eLearning into the Spanish public administration and to identify factors affecting transfer efficacy. Through a quantitative longitudinal exploratory study, the questionnaire FET was applied to workers in four Spanish public administrations after training; two and a half months after responding to it, a questionnaire to measure the degree of transfer (CTd) was sent. In total, we collected 1,144 respondents of workers who participated in training, 43.4% of whom were involved in eLearning training.

After statistically analyzing the collected data, no statistically significant differences were detected in the degree of transfer of workers between those who had classroom training and those who did eLearning training. Nonetheless, factors that determine the transfer are different since the explanatory model for each type of training is different in the number and weight of the factors involved. The paper analyze both models, as well as the impact of the data obtained for the Spanish public administration and other public institutions that, with a similar context, can benefit from knowing which elements differentially influence eLearning training efficacy compared to classroom training.