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Assessing Training Effectiveness

Written by: Dr. Fathi El-Nadi

Article Overview: There is no question about it. Training and development is gaining attention in Corporate America. The industry is growing and changing to achieve a variety of goals, from satisfying immediate employment skills shortages to meeting organizations' long-term strategic needs. According to a survey conducted by Chief Learning Officer magazine and Fairfield Research Inc., enterprise firms in the United States spend, on average, $3.7 million every year on learning and training. Total spending on corporate learning by enterprise companies is forecast to increase to $11.8 billion—a projected 4.3 percent increase in 2003.

Assessing Training Effectiveness

Although many CEOs value training because they believe it strengthens the organization and serves as a retention tool, not many are clear on how to measure the return on the investment (ROI). With increased pressure to justify expenses, CLOs are looking for ways to show improved bottom-line results.
"We are seeing more and more CLOs link the development of a training program to the strategic direction of the company," said Linda Gookin, senior consultant at the Hay Group, a professional services firm that helps companies worldwide develop their employees. "To maximize the effectiveness of a training program, an organization needs to use ongoing assessment to establish learning outcomes, link them to a performance plan, define measures and finally evaluate learning—and this must be an integral part of the corporate strategic plan."

There is a huge gap between the learning programs that produce results and many of those being implemented today. Certainly, there are many reasons this gap exists, including failure to link training to core business strategies, uncertain business and economic conditions, lack of acknowledgement or reward for training accomplishments and failure to make training an integral part of an employee's job. These and many other factors can hinder the development of a learning program that produces results.

However, one of the main reasons CLOs have a difficult time proving the value of a corporate training program is that testing and assessment are not fully integrated into the program. All too often, testing and assessment are viewed as separate from the learning process and as afterthoughts to the development and implementation of the learning program. But without ongoing integration of testing and assessment into a learning program, there is no reliable way to know how much learning has taken place, if any at all. A renewed focus on testing and assessment is necessary to improve the quality of instruction, the effectiveness of the curriculum, and the validity of the outcomes.

When testing and assessment are held completely tangential to learning, the entire organization is affected by the negative impact on the learning process, the learning outcomes and the ability to measure ROI. Only when we hold learners and the learning process accountable to themselves will we see verifiable proof that learning has taken place. When you are able to fully integrate testing and assessment into the development, management and evaluation of your organization's learning system, you will be able to spend your training dollars knowing—not hoping, not guessing, not assuming, but knowing—that you are getting something in return.

Certainly, an organization's advertising team would not set aside money for a print ad campaign without knowing something about the publications in which the advertisements will appear. The team would want to know about the audience that reads the publication. Creative ideas would be tested using a variety of techniques such as focus groups, image studies and positioning research. Copytesting would be done to diagnose the effectiveness of the proposed ad. All of this would take place before the publication hits the newsstand. Once the advertisement is printed, market-tracking evaluations would be conducted to assess the impact on sales. Changes in customer attitudes and behaviors would be measured. The advertising team wouldn't dream of ignoring this information because it understands the value and usefulness in determining how to allocate resources.

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