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Measuring the Impact of Training

There's a vast body of knowledge available on assessing the impact and effectiveness of training.  So why aren’t more companies doing it?

Paradoxically, we find that many of the top learning organizations are rarely required to justify the impact of their work.  Top learning organizations closely link their efforts to the needs and strategies of the business, and gain the support of senior management who see the inherent value of learning to organizational performance and alignment.

Lagging training organizations feel compelled to justify the value of their work.  Instead of searching for models to measure the relevance of what they do, their challenge must be to link their efforts more closely to the business drivers so that their value will not continually be under question.Since measuring the business impact or ROI of training is complex, time-consuming, and costly – another reason it rarely gets done – a measurement strategy that makes sense is to focus on a very small number of mission-critical projects.  These projects are often enabling key business strategies, such as revenue growth, globalization, or continuous improvement, so the time and effort required to set up control groups and measure the outcomes of these efforts provide valuable management information.  In addition, the business results of such projects are much easier to measure than the bread-and-butter work of L&D, which is providing employees with the skills they need to do their jobs.  How do you value that?

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Comments

Hi Tom, I've worked with too many organizations which can't answer the following questions when they ask me to build a training solution: How do you know (in quantified terms) that there is a problem? How do you know that 'skills deficiency' is the root cause of the problem? What quantified result will indicate success? Dialog around these topics must occur before training (or any other solution) is prescribed.

Yes, Mick, I agree. To the extent that we are rigorous about the front end, and making sure we are providing training that is targeted, there will be much less need to justify the results on the back end.

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