Curt’s View of Workplace Learning

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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