Clarifying your Learning and Development Strategy, by Wendy Hirsh and John Burgoyne, Training Journal, June 2009

This is also one of a series of three articles but I did not review the other two because they said nothing new and focussed on conventional issues of course design and delivery. I have chosen to review this one because it concentrates on the thorny issue of evaluation - which everyone seems to want to hear about - and does make some useful points to guide the learning professional in the search for this Holy Grail.

As is normal in such articles, the four Kirkpatrick levels are used as the language of the debate; in our view this is the key benefit of the Kirkpatrick framework. The authors make the important point that there are multiple stakeholders who will want different kinds of evaluation of courses and four are mentioned - the learner, the external provider, the line manager and the L&D professional who commissions the training. The argument is that evaluation should be based on the decisions that have to be made by the stakeholders and their relative importance.

The article quotes a framework developed by Mark Easterby-Smith that suggests that the first stage of evaluation is to determine the questions to be asked; are they about the effectiveness of the process or the learning outcome? Are they about proving success or trying to find a better way of doing things? These fundamental questions need to be asked before any evaluation methodology can be considered.

One rule of thumb that I had not heard before is the suggestion that the cost of evaluation should not exceed 10% of the cost of the training. Though I applaud any attempt to relate the two together, it begs the question of how you define cost in each case and how much time it would take a financial person to carry out the costing evaluation. It does however lead to the sensible conclusion that more sophisticated evaluations at the higher end of the Kirkpatrick levels are only likely to be valid for major strategic learning initiatives.

The article ends - as many such articles inevitably do - with some points that have been made many times before; that evaluation should be built into course design and should be developed as a long-term strategic approach rather than a ‘one-off’ hit for a particular programme. There are rather too many clichés in the article - evaluation is a strategic journey for instance - but I did like the description of this journey; from doing things well to doing things better, to doing better things.


To access this article go to:

http://www.trainingjournal.com/tj/2186.html