Best questions for vocational school student survey about hands-on training quality

Here are some of the best questions for a Vocational School Student survey about hands-on training quality, plus tips on crafting them effectively. You can build a tailored conversational survey using Specific’s AI survey generator in seconds: generate your own now.

Best open-ended questions for vocational school student survey about hands-on training quality

Open-ended questions are the best way to get real insights and deeper context from students. They allow students to tell us what’s on their mind without being boxed in. We use open-ended questions when we want honest feedback, new ideas, and true stories from real experience. Here's our top 10:

1. How would you describe your overall experience with hands-on training at your school?

2. What specific skills have you gained through the hands-on training sessions?

3. Can you share an example of a project or task that helped you learn the most?

4. What aspects of the hands-on training did you find most effective?

5. Were there any parts of the training you felt were lacking or could be improved?

6. How well do you think the hands-on training prepared you for real-world work environments?

7. How involved and supportive were your trainers during hands-on activities?

8. What challenges did you face during practical sessions, and how did you overcome them?

9. Are there any tools or technologies you wish had been included in the training?

10. If you could change one thing about the hands-on training, what would it be?

In countries with robust apprenticeship models—like Germany’s dual education system—hands-on training is a core strategy to bridge the gap between learning and employment, directly tying education to real job-market needs. [1]

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for vocational school student survey about hands-on training quality

Single-select multiple-choice questions are perfect when we want to quantify responses or get a baseline before diving deeper. These are especially helpful for starting conversations—sometimes it’s just easier for students to pick from a shortlist before giving more detailed answers later.

Question: How would you rate the quality of the hands-on training you’ve received?

• Excellent

• Good

• Average

• Poor

Question: How well do you feel the training equipped you for the workplace?

• Very well

• Somewhat well

• Not well

• Not at all

Question: Which of the following best describes the trainer’s involvement during hands-on training?

• Highly engaged

• Supportive but not always present

• Rarely involved

• Other

When to follow up with "why?" Whenever a student selects an answer that could mean different things to different people (for example, “Average” or “Not well”), we should ask them why. Follow-ups like “What made you choose that answer?” or “Can you give an example?” uncover the context we need.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? If you’re not 100% confident you know every possible answer, add “Other” and ask a follow-up like, “Please specify.” This can uncover gaps or unique situations we didn’t anticipate, and helps us surface unexpected insights.

Quality is often uneven: for example, a large study in Germany found only about 25% of students rate their training as high quality, while about 50% saw it as moderate, and one in four rated it rather poor. [2]

Should you include an NPS question?

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a simple but powerful metric: “On a scale from 0–10, how likely are you to recommend your hands-on training experience to a friend?” Using an NPS question in a hands-on training survey just makes sense, because it captures overall sentiment and makes it easy to track whether efforts to improve are actually making students happier over time. It’s quick for respondents and reliable for benchmarking.

Try our ready-to-launch NPS survey for vocational school students about hands-on training quality.

The power of follow-up questions

Automatic follow-up questions are a game changer. They turn feedback collection from a static list into a real, conversational experience—diving in to clarify, dig deeper, or ask for examples when we need them. We wrote about this in our article on automated AI follow-up questions—it’s worth a read if you want to understand the logic behind this approach.

With Specific, AI follow-ups happen in real time. If a student says, “The training was okay,” the AI immediately asks what could make it better or what they found lacking. This saves us the hassle of going back and forth over email or running extra sessions, and it captures richer feedback right away.

• Student: “Our trainer was decent, but sometimes hard to reach.”

• AI follow-up: “Can you share a situation where you needed support and couldn’t reach your trainer? How did that affect your project?”

How many followups to ask? Two or three are usually enough to get the full story. We recommend settings that let students skip to the next question once we have what we need—Specific offers this out of the box.

This makes it a conversational survey: the back-and-forth feels natural, not robotic. That’s what makes surveys built with Specific different.

AI survey response analysis: Even with more unstructured text, responses are easy to analyze. AI tools (like in this guide) summarize key themes, so we can find insights fast—with no manual sorting.

Try generating a survey with automated follow-ups, and see just how much more valuable your feedback becomes.

How to prompt ChatGPT (or any AI) to generate great survey questions

This technique is powerful if you like experimenting or need custom questions for your particular students or program. Start by asking directly for a list:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for Vocational School Student survey about hands-on training quality.

The more context you give the AI about your school, your program, and what you care about, the better the questions will be. Here’s a stronger prompt:

Our vocational school specializes in healthcare and technical trades. We're looking to improve the quality of hands-on training. Suggest 10 open-ended questions that can help us understand what works, what doesn't, and what students wish we changed.

Next, to structure your survey:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

This helps you prioritize. Once you see the categories, you can double-click:

Generate 10 questions for categories “Trainer engagement,” “Skill relevance,” and “Facilities & Equipment.”

This approach gets you specific, focused questions and leaves room for you to copy-paste them directly into your survey—or use the AI survey maker for even more control.

What is a conversational survey?

Traditional surveys force students to fill out rigid, impersonal forms. With AI-powered, conversational surveys, the whole process feels like chatting with a smart interviewer: the survey responds and adapts in real time, following up to learn more, just like a human would. This makes a huge difference, both in response quality and completion rates.

Why use AI for vocational school student surveys? AI survey examples go deeper than old-school forms. You tap into real context, stories, and actionable feedback—without turning analysis into a month-long project. Plus, everything is optimized for mobile and can be shared with a simple link or built right into your school’s online portal. With Specific, the experience is smooth and feels almost like texting a friend, making students comfortable and more likely to share openly.

If you want a step-by-step approach, our guide covers how to create hands-on training surveys in detail. And the AI survey editor feature lets you chat with AI to revise anything in your survey in seconds—not possible with forms.

See this hands-on training quality survey example now

Try this hands-on survey experience for yourself—see how smart, real-time AI follow-ups and easy analysis transform student feedback into clear, actionable insights. Don’t miss the chance to collect feedback that actually moves the needle.