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Polishing Your Gems—and Showing the Value of Your Training Efforts

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Thu Jun 30 2016

Polishing Your Gems—and Showing the Value of Your Training Efforts
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Have you ever gone on a treasure hunt or maybe seen one in the movies? The seeker searches for a treasure chest—usually attending to challenges along the way. Imagine large rolling rocks that are difficult to control! Eventually, the seeker locates the elusive treasure chest, but not all of its contents are gleaming. There is some culling and polishing to do before being ready to present the gems to the people funding the adventure.

Back in the real world, learning and development (L&D) professionals are charged with the mission to add value to the business (often through a request for “training”). Like a treasure hunter, they search and analyze data—attending to challenges along the way. As you’ve likely experienced, they face multiple competing priorities, regulatory controls, and insufficient resources—all of which impact successful learning. What’s more, once the treasure is “found” (learners have learned something!), they will need to cull the treasure before they can present “value” to stakeholders. No doubt, it can be challenging to find—and polish—those precious gems.

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Earlier this year, I presented a workshop at the New England regional ATD conference. The topic, Polishing Your Gems, focused on creating an evaluation plan for a learning solution. Joined by client Matt Matosic from the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC), we worked through a case study summarizing BPHC’s course on Hospital-Based Patient Decontamination and discussing options for evaluating its success. Participants then had an opportunity to begin developing their own evaluation plans, leveraging an “Evaluation and Measurement Planning Checklist” we provided.

Where—and When—to Start the Treasure Hunt

Let’s answer the “when” question. That’s easy. When you are asked to help solve a problem, you should explore some core questions. This occurs during needs analysis (the A in ADDIE) and your analysis should be confirmed with the stakeholder before getting too far into design, and certainly prior to beginning development.

Where can instructional designers start? Here are some questions to consider in your own evaluation planning.

Business Impact

  • Why is this training (or other intervention) being requested? 

  • What is driving this request or identification of this issue?

  • How will solving this problem support the organization’s business goals? 

  • What do you need to be able to show as an outcome of your efforts? 

  • Who will see the results? (Consider: L&D management, business line management, senior management, learners themselves, instructional designer, instructor, funders, and other stakeholders) 

  • What will each stakeholder do with the information?

_You might recognize that many of these questions relate to Kirkpatrick’s Level 4 of Evaluation (business impact).

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Job Performance Impact

  • What changes in job performance are needed to support meeting the business goals?

  • What changes in job performance can reasonably be addressed via a learning solution?

  • What workplace supports (such as managers, mentors, or peers; job aids or other performance support tools; periodic updates or web meetings) are realistically available to support the change in job performance?

_Did you notice that these relate to Kirkpatrick’s Level 3 (behavior change on the job)?

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Learning Impact

Once you’ve identified the business needs, or goals, and the job performance that support those goals, you can begin to dig deeper and define the learning requirements:

  • What must be learned during the training in order for the performance to change? 

  • How will we know that the learning took place?

You’re getting the hang of it if you recognize that these questions will inform your learning objectives and, more importantly, the Kirkpatrick Level 2 plans to measure learning during the event. 

Digging Deeper

Ideally, instructional designers ask these questions as part of a needs analysis. They plan the evaluation strategy during the “analyze” or “design” phases of work, before getting to development. Likewise, strategizing early in the process can help you ensure that you know which gems to seek, where to locate them, and what challenges may arise. However, you may also want to ask: 

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  • What key challenges do you foresee in conducting these evaluations?

  • How might you address each challenge?

No doubt, if L&D pros wait until management asks to see the impact of work before planning an evaluation strategy, it may be too late to find the right “treasures.” 

Finally, while classroom evaluation forms are common (in fact, they are the most frequently used evaluation tools), evidence shows this information has a low correlation with learning. Often, we use “standardized” course evaluation forms. I urge you to review those and consider adding questions that address a few key issues. Some potential questions: 

  1. How confident are learners that they can apply what they’ve learned in the class to the workplace?

  2. How motivated are learners to apply what they’ve learned?

  3. Do learners feel they have the support needed?

These questions are less about how learners feel about the course itself, and more about how likely they are to change their job performance and what they might need to help them.

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