Business Priorities for Training

TrainingOutsourcing.com regularly conducts polls among its membership, who are training professionals working within businesses or who work as consultants to businesses. One of the questions asked was:

What is the most important metric that your learning organization could contribute to positively impact business performance?

As you can see from the data summaries below, the number one answer was consistently Increase Customer Satisfaction. It would be interesting to use these same metrics to see how individual training programs actually affect business performance. Another challenge is figuring out exactly how to measure whether the training affected these metrics, or whether other factors made the difference.

A common standard for measurement of training success is the four levels approach originated by Donald Kirkpatrick in the late Fifties. He identified the following levels:

Level 1 - Participant "smile sheets." These are the evaluation forms we all fill out immediately after taking formal, classroom training. These evaluations contain various questions about the suitability, completeness, and usefulness of the training materials. We are also asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the instructor. Level 1 is useful for spotting glaring issues about the training or instructor. Level 1 evaluations, however, are pretty subjective, often skewed by the evaluator's liking or disliking the instructor, which may be for various personal, stylistic, political or petty reasons. Almost all training has some forms of Level 1 evaluation.

Level 2 - Learning. Did learning take place? This level is measured by various exercises and tests administered during or immediately after training. The advantage of this method is that trainees have to demonstrate that they have met the learning objectives. The shortcoming of this method is in not measuring how well the training translates to the actual job. Most training has some degree of Level 2 evaluation.

Level 3 - Performance. Do the trainees perform better on the job than before training? To be objective some sort of performance measurement has to be taken before the training and afterwards. In practice, this measurements is often taken by asking supervisors whether trainees perform better after training. This supervisor approach is not very accurate. Few businesses attempt to measure increases in productivity because of training.

Level 4 - Impact on Business. Did the training have a measurable impact on various business metrics? This measurement really answers the question, "Was the right training given?" For example, you could have training that passed Levels 1, 2, and 3 with flying colors but turned out to have no effect or negative effect on business metrics. How could that happen? Well, maybe the organization successfully trains sales people to sell better, when what they need is better customer service for existing customers. Selling more merely exacerbates customer service issues.

The difficulty with Level 4 evaluation is always, "Can meaningful measurements be taken that clearly link the results to the training?" If you look at metrics in the the data summaries below, can you imagine more than one factor that could affect each of these metrics? Probably so. The difficulty of implementation makes Level 4 the least used of the evaluation methods.

However, Level 4 is also the most powerful way of evaluating, and I would argue, clearly the one most worth doing. The trick is causal linkage of metrics to the training. For example, my company once did training for a call center, which had experienced many orders bounced for technical reasons. Before the training we interviewed managers and top performing workers to see what metric they thought would be most impacted by successful training. They all indicated "fewer bounced orders for technical reasons." So, causation was highly indicated. After the training, bounced orders diminished by 1/3, so the program was deemed successful.

No matter what level of evaluation a company chooses, some evaluation needs to happen; otherwise, the training dollars may be completely wasted and no one would know. David Orr

Data Summaries:

Business IT :

Reduce time to productivity
18.52%
Increase top line revenue
18.52%
Decrease expenses
11.11%
Increase customer satisfaction
20.37%
Increase profit
11.11%
Increase customer retention
9.26%
Decrease error rates
11.11%

Healthcare & Medical

Reduce time to productivity
13.33%
Increase top line revenue
15.56%
Decrease expenses
13.33%
Increase customer satisfaction
20%
Increase profit
13.33%
Increase customer retention
11.11%
Decrease error rates
13.33%

Business Strategy and Outsourcing Learning Community

Reduce time to productivity
17.29%
Increase top line revenue
12.78%
Decrease expenses
13.53%
Increase customer satisfaction
19.55%
Increase profit
14.29%
Increase customer retention
12.78%
Decrease error rates
9.77%