Here are some of the best questions for an employee survey about training and development, plus practical tips to help you craft them efficiently. With Specific, you can build an engaging, conversational survey in seconds—just generate your employee training and development survey and start gathering crucial feedback right away.
Best open-ended questions for employee survey about training and development
Open-ended questions are essential when you want honest, detailed feedback. These questions help uncover themes and ideas you wouldn’t surface with multiple-choice responses. You’ll use them best when you’re looking for deep qualitative insights or want to capture the unique voices of your team.
Here’s our curated list of top open-ended questions to ask employees about training and development:
What has been the most valuable training or development experience you’ve had here?
Which skills do you feel would help you advance your career, but are missing from current training options?
Describe a situation where applying a training takeaway made your job easier or more effective.
How do you prefer to learn new skills or concepts at work?
What barriers have you faced in accessing or completing training programs?
If you could design a training course, what topic would you focus on and why?
In your view, how could our training and development initiatives improve?
Have you ever recommended our training programs to a colleague? Why or why not?
What would motivate you to participate more in learning and development activities?
Is there anything else you’d like to share about your growth or development at work?
These questions give employees room to elaborate, which can reveal trends, gaps, and actionable opportunities. Given 94% of employees say they would stay longer at a company investing in their learning and development, focusing on open-ended feedback helps you pinpoint exactly what will retain great talent. [2]
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for employee survey about training and development
Single-select multiple-choice questions work best when you want to quantify responses or get a quick pulse on key topics. They’re easier and quicker for employees to answer, making them great at the start of a survey (to ease people in), and can provide a structure for deeper follow-ups.
Here are three strong examples:
Question: How satisfied are you with the current training and development opportunities at our company?
Very satisfied
Somewhat satisfied
Neutral
Somewhat dissatisfied
Very dissatisfied
Question: Which type of training do you find most effective?
Workshops/seminars
Online courses
On-the-job training
One-on-one coaching
Other
Question: How often do you participate in training or professional development activities?
Monthly or more
Quarterly
1-2 times per year
Rarely
Never
When to follow up with "why?" It’s smart to follow up a structured choice with a "why?" question when you want to dig deeper. For example, if someone selects "Somewhat dissatisfied" with training opportunities, ask: "What is missing from our training and development that would improve your experience?" Follow-ups help you move from simple ratings to actionable insights.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? "Other" is crucial when you want to ensure employees aren’t boxed into provided answers. Following up on "Other" with a prompt like "Please specify" often uncovers overlooked themes or unique needs, leading to discovery of new training approaches you hadn’t considered.
Remember, 74% of employees feel they aren’t reaching their full potential due to lack of growth opportunities, so catching every detail, even unexpected ones via “Other,” matters. [3]
NPS question for employee training and development surveys
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a trusted way to gauge how likely employees are to recommend your company’s training and development to others. It’s straightforward and offers clear benchmarking. Here’s how it works: you ask, “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our training and development programs to a colleague?” Promoters (9-10) signal strong satisfaction, while detractors (0-6) reveal opportunities for improvement.
NPS makes sense for employee training surveys because it gives you a simple, trackable metric that ties directly to engagement and culture. When paired with open-ended follow-ups (“What’s the main reason for your score?”), it becomes an engine for continuous improvement. You can instantly build your own employee training NPS survey with Specific’s AI generator.
The power of follow-up questions
Follow-up questions multiply the value of any employee training survey. The right follow-up transforms unclear or short responses into rich, usable context. Specific takes this to another level with automated AI follow-up questions that adapt in real-time—just like a skilled interviewer.
These smart follow-ups make the survey a conversation, not an interrogation. They capture the reasons behind “why” someone answered the way they did, saving you from chasing down missing info later or sending dreaded follow-up emails. And by engaging respondents in the moment, the process feels seamless and human.
Employee: “The training this year was okay.”
AI follow-up: “What would have made the training more effective for you?”
Employee: “I wish there were more online courses.”
AI follow-up: “Are there specific topics you’re hoping to see offered online?”
How many follow-ups to ask? Generally, 2-3 follow-up threads per question strike a balance between depth and fatigue. Specific lets you control this, and you can enable survey logic so that if you’ve collected what you need, the survey skips ahead.
This makes it a conversational survey, like an ongoing exchange—not a cold form. Conversational surveys drive engagement, meaningful answers, and reduced dropout rates.
AI analysis of qualitative feedback. Even with lots of open text, powerful AI-powered survey response analysis from Specific turns raw responses into themes and summaries in seconds—no more manual coding or wasted time.
Automated, AI-driven follow-ups are a new era for employee feedback—run a survey and see the difference firsthand.
How to prompt ChatGPT or other AI to suggest great training and development survey questions
If you want to generate your own list of questions with ChatGPT (or any AI), the secret is framing your prompt with enough detail.
Start simple:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for employee survey about training and development.
But you’ll get especially relevant results if you give more context. For example:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for employee survey about training and development. We are a fast-growing tech company with remote teams. We want to uncover how employees feel about development opportunities and what resources they’re missing to learn new skills.
Next, ask the AI for categories:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output the categories with the questions under each.
Finally, target specific areas you want to focus on:
Generate 10 questions for the categories “Barriers to Access,” “Preferred Training Formats,” and “Desired Topics.”
This iterative prompting is basically how we built robust AI survey tools at Specific—if you want to skip all these steps and go straight to a polished, expert-made survey, try the AI survey generator.
What is a conversational survey?
A conversational survey uses AI to guide respondents through a series of questions, adapting and responding in real time as a human researcher would. Rather than just moving from one static question to the next, the survey feels like a dialogue—because it is one.
Let’s compare the traditional, manual approach with an AI-powered conversational survey:
Manual Survey | AI-Generated Conversational Survey |
|---|---|
Painful form-building—every question written manually | Prompt-based creation—AI handles question design from your goals |
Static, one-size-fits-all questions | Dynamic, personalized questions and smart follow-ups |
Hard to analyze open text | Automatic AI summaries and analytics for easy insights |
Disengaged users, drop-offs | Conversational, chat-like interface boosts engagement |
Why use AI for employee surveys? With AI survey examples, you get expert-quality, bias-free questions built for engagement. Specific’s AI-driven surveys reduce manual effort, streamline data collection, and enable deeper understanding of what employees think about training and development. You can read more on how to create an employee training and development survey.
Specific offers the best-in-class conversational survey experience, making feedback smooth and even enjoyable for both creators and respondents. You can easily edit your survey on the fly with our chat-based AI survey editor—just describe the change you want, and AI updates your questions instantly.
See this training and development survey example now
Ready to accelerate employee growth and retention? See for yourself how a conversational, AI-generated survey can surface richer, more honest insights—and make training feedback actionable today.