Curt’s View of Workplace Learning

I’ve been thinking about what workplace learning organizations create reports on and why they report on those things a lot lately.  Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

• Learner Attendance – We report on this so that the organization gets the feeling that we’re providing what the organization needs.  If there’s no attendance then we’re not supplying the right product.  And we also report on this for courses deemed mandatory for whatever reason.
• Learning Effectiveness – In this case we look at whether the learning product itself created an atmosphere or situation so that a typical learner could learn what the learning product was designed to teach.
• Learner Learning – We look at this so we know if each learner learned what they were supposed to learn.
• Learning Impact – This is the hard one.  We report on this so that we can communicate to the organization that the work we are doing has an impact on the business.
• Learning Work – We report on this so that the organization knows we using our resources effectively and managing our business for the greatest level of output with the highest quality possible.

What do you think?  Do you report on something different?

Curt Will

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Dan is writing a four part article for Training Magazine.  So far he’s published three parts and I’m pretty sure that Dan understands why I developed TrainPro Central.  It’s because we (workplace learning people) can’t always just focus on Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels.  There’s more.  Business people want to know that we can run our business.

The problem I have is that the structure of the article seems a little disjointed and certainly academic.

Read for yourself and let me know if I’m just not smart enough to follow the articles.

Measurements for Evaluation and Management of the Training Department – by Dan Klein

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

I’m looking forward to the final part to see if it brings it all together.

Curt Will

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Is focusing on the 4 or 5 levels of training evaluation the best way for you to measure the effectiveness of your workplace learning team?  Or is it only one way?  Since I believe that managing a workplace learning team is like managing a consulting business, I’d say that there are other measurements that need to be considered; like how efficiently your organization is operating.

And chances are, if you manage some sort of workplace learning team long enough, one of the questions you’ll have to answer at some point is “Why do you need so many (designers, managers, instructors, administrative staff…  you get the picture)?”  Or perhaps upper management has asked you to remove XX amount of headcount and you need to communicate the impact of that on you’re team’s immediate and long term deliverables. 

The answer to all of these questions is capacity planning.  So here are my tips to capacity planning for a workplace learning organization.

• Establish nominal development timelines needed for each type of project.  You can use “industry standards” but it’s best to use actual measurements from your environment, your team.
• Compute available work time for your team for each resource.
• Then add up all of the time required to complete the projects your team is currently working on and those in your pipeline.

Now you have all of the required data and you just need to lay it out in a way that makes sense for you and your team.  I’ve attached a very simple example. 

Capacity planning for workplace learning teams requires that you track and measure what’s going on in your department if you want to be able to answer all of those questions that you’re going to need to answer at some point.

Curt Will

www.trainprocentral.com

Do we sometimes get so wrapped up in trying to statically prove the impact of our training interventions using scientific methods that we sometimes miss the simple, non scientific examples?  Are we missing the examples that we could be using to market our department internally, especially during the economic downturn?

Recently I’ve been looking for ways to measure the effectiveness of some sales training programs.  So I’ve been looking for data driven measures that the sales teams use to indicate performance level; something other than sales quota performance.  That search has been difficult because there just isn’t a standard measure used by all sales teams and as usual, the data itself it tough to come by.

Then someone pointed out to me that 8 out of the top 10 sales people on one of the sales teams has taken and passed a particular internal certification exam.  8 of the top 10!  And I know what you’re thinking; there could be a whole bunch of reasons, none of which are attributable to those people passing that exam, that are responsible for the apparent correlation.  How about those eight people are motivated go getters?  Or how about the managers of those eight gave them a deadline for getting it done?  You get the idea, there’s no way we could prove that passing the exam is the reason they’re in the top 10.

The bottom line is that all that may not matter.  As we all know, impressions can be seen as reality sometimes.  And right now, all of us that manage the workplace learning function are looking for ways to show the bigger organization that we’re having an impact.  And of course just to be completely honest, if I were going to talk to one of the Sales VPs about those 8 of 10 sales people, I’d be sure to throw in a disclaimer about validity.  But my guess is that they’ll remember the 8 of 10 thing.

I’m not suggesting that you abandon your drive for research driven measurements that use scientific methods to prove the impact your training solutions are having.  I’m just suggesting that you may have some easily available data that will pass a reasonable smell test, that you can use in informal conversations to market what your department is doing.

Curt Will

www.trainprocentral.com