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Traditionally, learning organizations have measured their performance in learning terms: How many courses have been taken? How many learners completed courses? How many students showed up? How many scored over 70 percent on the test? While these measurements have validity for the training department, they mean very little to department heads and CFOs, whose prime concern is meeting monetary and fiscal targets.
Traditional approaches to measurement also lead to the question, “How do I measure the use of informal learning?” My answer to that is, “You don’t directly measure informal learning!” First, understand that informal learning occurs in all companies, whether it is measured or not. Regardless of how you use informal learning the outcomes of its use should be measured along with any other tool you decide to use.
Informal learning is the improvised, unplanned instructional efforts that are part of the everyday fabric of business operations. Informal learning represents 70 percent of learning that occurs in the workplace.
Finding the value in learning
Stephen Covey got it right when he said, “Begin with the end in mind.” When we look into the value of learning, the first thing we should consider is, “What value does training bring to the company?” The senior executives of the organization do not care necessarily about how well the learning organization is training the staff, how many of its employees had training this week, how many people completed courses in the last year, or how many achieved mastery. They do care about the wellbeing of the company.
One of the many misconceptions in business is that a training department is there to train the company’s employees. However, the only justifiable reason to have a training department is to assist the company in attaining its bottom line goals or critical business goals. So, when we evaluate the contribution training brings to the company, shouldn’t we look at how it affects the bottom line numbers rather than how well individual training courses are being accepted by individual learners?
Tom Kelly, (then) VP, Internet Learning Solutions, at a panel discussion for Corporate University Week, pointed out that, “The most important thing any training department can do is to solve a business problem. The metrics of success [of a recent program] were about the business outcomes desired and had nothing to do with traditional training metrics such as number of students trained.”
Now, while most training management would agree with how important solving a business problem is, very few ever put measurements in place to show how solving that business problem has added to the bottom line of the company.
Unfortunately, it is far easier to measure how well training is doing in learning terms, because that is all the data we have access to! We know how many people have taken a course, because we recorded it either electronically through our e-learning toolkit/LMS/package or through an attendance log of learners at a course. We can also see how many of our learners attained completion through the same means or a final test. We have control of this environment, so we can get to the numbers.
How can we measure ourselves on company bottom line, throughput or revenue? We do not track that information. In fact, we cannot get to that information without going through the relevant departments, and they are too busy to help us (or perhaps just too stubborn to give us the information).
What should we be measuring?
What is it that we, as learning professionals, bring to an organization? Think of what would happen to a company if we completely removed all training. Just take the training department out of the organization and set them free. Think of your company. What would be affected?
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