How effective are the learning and development activities in your organisation? Do you know? Most organisations invest, often heavily, in learning and development activities. These are expensive, both in terms of the activities themselves and in terms of the opportunity costs of staff attendance.What do you get from these activities? More importantly, how did you, as an organisation, expect to benefit from investing in those activities?These may seem obvious questions and ones which managers would ask all the time, but our experience as evaluators suggests that these questions are not asked, or are not asked routinely by managers and leaders. They are often content to let staff go to learning and development events with only a superficial idea of what the person’s needs are and to accept the trainers’ evaluation based solely on the learner’s reaction.We need to be asking much more fundamental questions in order to maximise the value to the organisation and to the individual. Once we start to ask these questions, it will also start to tell us something about the way people are able to apply the learning in the workplace and to identify the obstacles to increased effectiveness.There are many techniques and tactics for gathering this information including observation (of the learning activities or of the work), interviewing of managers, learners and facilitators, focus groups and documentary analysis. You may wish to do this yourself, but there are advantages to using an independent evaluator. Evaluation is an inherently political activity as the evaluator becomes aware of information and data that they may not have come across had they not been evaluating. This potentially puts them in a position of power that can affect their objectivity if they are simultaneously part of the organisation’s management structure. The independent evaluator is protected from these pressures and can guarantee anonymity to data sources that cannot be granted by interested managers.Each evaluation project will be different as it will address different questions but, generally, it will follow a pattern such as this. Firstly, we should ask ‘What was the organisational issue to which learning and development was seen as part of the solution?’ Of course, this implies that this question was considered before the intervention, but even if it was not, most organisations will be able to provide a picture of the thinking that led to the intervention.Then we will ask, ‘And how successful were we in achieving the result we expected?’ If the answer is that the intervention has been wholly successful, then, arguably, the learning and development activity must have had the desired effect. In most cases, as we all know, this is unlikely to be the case, so we move on to ask ‘To what extent have people put into practice the learning that we expected them to achieve?’ If this reveals that they have done so, but still the organisational changes have not happened, the reasons must lie somewhere else in the system. The data we have gathered so far will start to shed light of where that problem lies. If they are not putting it into practice, we need to ask ‘Why?’Did they learn what was intended but are not putting into practice? If not, this may indicate managerial or leadership problems, it might mean cultural resistance or it might indicate structural barriers. Systematic data gathering will tell you the answer. It might even tell us that people were required to learn the wrong things and the reason they are not putting them into practice is that the learning has no relevance to their work.Finally, of course, people may not be putting learning into practice because they didn’t learn it in the first place. This may be the fault of the facilitator, the facilities or the design. Only systematic evaluation will tell you the answers.As evaluators, we have seen all these issues revealed by systematic gathering and analysis of data and the presentation of conclusions to assist decision making in the organisation.Of course, evaluation might occasionally tell you that your investment in learning and development has been completely successful and then you might feel that you have invested heavily in evaluation for no benefit beyond the satisfaction of knowing that all is fine. This, we submit, is a rare event. Evaluation is a further investment but one which has a significant benefit in terms of protecting and maximising the benefits to be derived from learning and development. Evaluation tells you about your organisation and how it operates. Crucially, it shows you how your organisation could operate more effectively.Author: Mike J SimmonsArticle Source: EzineArticles.comProvided by: Duty on LCD/Plasma TV
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