Choosing an Online Performance Management Course
What to check before you pay, and what to do so you actually finish it.
Online management courses are easy to buy and easy to abandon. Completion rates across self-paced professional training are poor, and the usual reason is not that the content was bad. It is that nothing in the arrangement obliged anyone to finish. Before you choose a course, it is worth separating the two questions: is this the right course, and will I get through it.
What to check before paying
Is the syllabus published in full
Not the marketing summary. The actual list of modules and what each one covers. A provider confident in their material publishes it, because reading it makes people more likely to buy rather than less. A provider who gives you four bullet points and a promise of transformation is hiding either the thinness of the content or the fact that it is assembled from whatever was available.
Is there an examination, and what happens if you fail it
This is the question that separates a credential from a receipt. If the certificate arrives for completing the content, the certificate is evidence that you paid. Ask for the pass mark, how the exam is delivered, and how many attempts you get. A stated pass mark with a limited number of attempts is a sign the assessment is real.
Can you see part of it free
A full module, not a two-minute promotional video. The standard of one complete module tells you almost everything about the standard of the rest, which is why so few providers offer one. If there is no free module, look for a refund period that is long enough to work through some of the material and specific about what disqualifies you from it.
Who wrote it, and what did they do first
Performance management is a practitioner subject. Content written by people who have carried responsibility for other people's output reads differently from content assembled from other courses, and the difference shows up in the specifics: what to do when the objective stops making sense in July, what to write in the record of a conversation that went badly, how to handle someone who is failing and knows it.
What does it cost in total
Check for membership fees, annual renewal, exam fees charged separately and charges for a second attempt. A low headline price with recurring obligations behind it costs more over three years than a higher one-off price, and it is the most common place the real cost is concealed.
Making sure you finish
Decide in advance what you want to be able to do differently, in a sentence, before you enrol. Not learn about performance management, but something specific: write objectives that survive the year, stop avoiding the conversation with a particular person, build a record that would hold up if the rating were challenged. That sentence is what gets you back to module six.
Then book the time rather than finding it. A course of about ten hours is three evenings or one quiet weekend, and treating it as scheduled work rather than something to fit in is close to the whole difference between the people who finish and the people who do not. If the provider gives you six months, the deadline is six months away and your attention is not, so set your own.
Apply one thing per module while you are still in it. The material only becomes usable at the point where you have tried it on a real person with a real problem, and the gap between understanding an appraisal technique and being able to execute one is larger than it looks from the inside of a video.
Our answers to those questions
- Syllabus
- All eight modules published in detail on the performance management training for managers page before purchase.
- Examination
- Online exam, 70% pass mark, up to six attempts, included in the price.
- Free sample
- A full module free, not a preview clip.
- Total cost
- USD 950, no membership and no renewal fee.
- Time
- About ten hours, six months to complete.