Assessment of effectiveness of public integrity training workshops for civil servants - A case study

The general practice of civil servant training providers in Hungary is to evaluate their products only through surveying the reaction of participants. The obvious weakness of this practice is that the variance in the level of satisfaction does not necessarily coincide with the positive professional impact that the trainings are aimed to produce. This paper presents the results of an effectiveness assessment survey of a large public ethics and integrity training programme that was delivered to civil servants in Hungary. The trainings examined were delivered by the same methodology but conducted by 26 different trainers for 7362 participants. The assessment was not part either of the original project, or of the training design; it was run as an additional activity. The aim of the survey was to show that even with a simple method, applicable even with weak organizational capacities, information can be produced both for validation and curriculum development. The results prove that the trainings made a moderate but statistically significant impact on participants' knowledge and attitudes, and most changes happened in the targeted direction. Beyond the validation of the training methodology, the survey also produced information on trainers' performance and a relatively differentiated picture on participants' learning that can contribute to the further development of the methodology. Thus, the results prove that even with simple quantitative survey methods, evidence for both validation and learning can be produced. The results also raised some questions for further research.