Point
by Michele Pappalardo
Director, Business Training Resources
Training and development programs can be viewed as one of a company's most valuable tools to enhance worker skills and to achieve company goals. Assessing training's value is just one part of the process. But one needs to ask, how is value defined by the organization? Is it defined by higher profitability through increased employee productivity and lower turnover, and improved business operations through the implementation of continuous improvement best practices of employee skill development? If so, then measuring the value of training programs should be an integral part of any organization's business plan, not an afterthought, and some formal mechanism of evaluation should be developed and integrated as part of your organization's training initiative.
Developing an annual “strategic training plan” that includes evaluation is one way to insure that training and development programs have value. Training should be linked to specific business goals and employees should have training objectives that are measurable with simple tools designed to do just that. Strong recruitment and retention of employees, commitment and innovation from employees, customer satisfaction and profitability can be directly linked to training through simple evaluation practices.
Define the level of success of your training before you even begin! Remember, as Yogi Berra once said “If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up somewhere else.”
National Alliance of Business, Assessing the Value of Workforce Training 1997
Broad, Mary L., Newstrom, John W. – Transfer of Training. Addison-Wesley. 1998
Why a Business Approach to Training is Best. Human Resource Focus. July 2005
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Counterpoint
by Don Robertson
Co-Director, Leadership Dev Institute
We should be seeking improved performance as an outcome of investing in training. The trouble is, performance is not just an issue of competence , it is also significantly impacted by the commitment of the trainee. Training targets a skill. A participant can gain extraordinary knowledge related to a skill and be involved in endless practice related to that skill. The training can be completely successful in developing the competence of the trainee. But does that guarantee improved performance? Only if the trainee is also committed to apply what was learned to their work and demonstrate a new level of performance.
So the assessment process can be very complicated in relationship to demonstrating training does provide ROI. I can learn and practice communication techniques or time management tools; but if I don't choose to use them, performance does not significantly change. Sometimes the “desire” to use what is learned is a bigger challenge than the actual learning of the skill. That desire may not be as big an issue when dealing with technical skills, but when the skill set is a behavior change, the new skill behavior has to overcome old habits and comfort, regardless of how helpful the new behavior might be.
So if we want a return, we also need to impact commitment as well as competence. That is why we believe effective training must go beyond just raising the level of knowledge. It also needs to affect the trainee's mindset; his or her thinking about the skill being developed. The training needs to be viewed as part of the development process rather than a stand alone event. Expectations going into the training and application and accountability coming out, have to play a role in the process. Does that get included in the assessment? Not usually.
So if you want to get serious about evaluating training and demonstrating ROI, then you need to evaluate the development process, not just the training event. With that in mind, most companies, even those that take training very seriously, do not try to measure it because it is too complicated and too expensive to evaluate and get a true assessment. They focus on making sure the other aspects of the development process, such as setting expectations, requiring an application plan, and some form of accountability are in place. They know if those are working, the training will provide a return if the Level 1 and 2 measures, (Level 1 is participant evaluation and Level 2 is testing for learning of key concepts), are showing good results.
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