As 2009 comes to a close and 2010 rolls in, people around the world will reflect on their accomplishments and set goals for the new year. To ensure your training programs support the 2010 goals of your organization, resolve to invest more time than in the past in positioning your programs for success. Four simple steps can help:
1. Clarify Needs
Before deciding to offer a program, be clear on the highest level of need. This is a need that ultimately leads to making money, saving money, and/or avoiding costs. Examples of these opportunities are customer satisfaction, employee engagement, morale, market share, image, productivity, and operating costs. Once you are clear there, identify lower levels of need that are more specific and that lead you to a program aligned with the ultimate goal. The following series of questions can help you with this process.
- What areas need improvement that will help your organization ultimately make money, save money, or avoid cost? (Highest Level of Need)
- What specific business measures would tell you that improvement has been made? (Business Needs)
- What needs to happen (or stop happening) in order to improve the above defined measures? (Performance Needs)
- What is it that people need to know in order to do what you want them to do to address your business needs? (Learning Needs)
- How best can you deliver knowledge, skill, and/or information people need to know to do what you want them to do? (Preference Needs)
2. Develop SMART Objectives
Based on the identified needs, develop objectives that reflect each level of need. Be sure your objectives are SMART. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound objectives representative of stakeholder needs are critical to program success.
3. Communicate Program Objectives
This step, while on the surface is obvious, is often overlooked. This is particularly true when it comes to participants. Objectives are your positioning power. By communicating specific, measurable objectives reflective of all levels of need, designers, developers, and facilitators know what they need to do to make the program successful. Evaluators know what questions to ask during the evaluation. Supervisors, managers and senior leaders recognize that the program is on track with their goals. But the group to whom objectives are often not communicated so clearly are participants. This is particularly true when it comes to objectives beyond those targeting knowledge acquisition. Participants need to know not only what they are going to learn in a program, but what they are expected to do with what they learn and why they are expected to do it.
4. Evaluate Success
If you want to know whether or not your program is successful, evaluation is must. Programs for which needs are clear, objectives are SMART, and all stakeholders are in the 'loop' are more likely to drive results. But you will never know how well the program achieved those results or how to improve the program without evaluation The good news is that if you are clear as to why a program is being offered and you have set and communicated SMART objectives, evaluation is relatively simple!
Your Assignment When you return to work, identify a program and work with your team to answer the following questions:
- Are the needs for this program clear?
- Are the objectives SMART?
- Have we communicated the objectives to everyone who needs to know?
Further Reading
Annulis, H. and Gaudet, C. (in press) Developing Powerful Objectives. In Phillips, P. P. (editor) Handbook of Measuring and Evaluating Training . Alexandria: ASTD.
Phillips, J. J. and Phillips, P. P. (2008) B eyond Learning Objectives: Develop Measurable Objectives That Link to the Bottom Line . Alexandria: ASTD.
