Two things happened to me on the same day last week. First, I interviewed one of our clients about her company’s implementation of a Paradigm Learning program for an article I am writing. And second, I read an article in July’s T&D magazine entitled “The New Finish Line for Training”.

Here’s the connection:

The client – a very senior human resources professional with many years in the field of training and development who is now working for a multi-billion organization – had done nothing to evaluate whether our program had the results she anticipated. In fact, it was difficult to pin her down about what those anticipated results might have been. Even more perplexing to me was that Paradigm’s program was part of a much larger management curriculum – one that cost a lot of money to design and implement – and no evaluation had been done on that initiative either. Our client, however, reported that she was very pleased because everyone liked the program. In fact, company executives wanted to expand its use. No matter how hard I tried, however, I couldn’t get any information from her about any real results.

Later that day, I thought about her when reading “The New Finish Line for Training”. The authors, Cal Wick and his associates at the Fort Hill Company, outline their “six disciplines” approach to turning training into results, reiterating that on-the-job performance improvement is the way to gauge effective learning transfer. The sixth discipline, as defined in the article, is:

Document Results: Treat the investment in training and development like any other corporate investment. Measure the results and evaluate the impact to ensure that the program is producing an adequate return to stakeholders. Drive continuous improvement by comparing the actual outcomes to the expected results and actively seeking ways to enhance subsequent iterations.

Although I like the way the authors have pulled together and defined the six training disciplines, all of these concepts have been extensively written about and discussed throughout my three decades in this business – especially results documentation.

So, why don’t more companies do the things that they know they should do to ensure on the job performance improvement – including documentation of results? No doubt, time commitment is part of the reason for their lack of attention to this discipline. Complexity of evaluation is another.

Today, however, there are so many less time-consuming and complex ways of evaluating training investments: Easy-to-use surveys and quizzes for post-session evaluation. Internet-based, easy to deploy follow up approaches. “Case study” (interview) evaluation methods that gather “stories” around use of new skills and knowledge on the job as an alternative to financial ROI evaluations. And, of course, there are companies like Fort Hill that specialize in the area of follow through and evaluation services.

As suppliers, we encourage our clients to evaluate results of programs and even provide a variety of tools, techniques, advice and guidance. However, because each client’s implementation is unique – with differences in business need, audience, customization, integration with other learning programs and follow-through - clients need to decide whether evaluation is important enough to do and how best to do it given time, cost and cultural issues.

Many of our clients, of course, already do a great job of following through and evaluating how well training programs are meeting their needs. We just wish more of them would!

Any thoughts?