Unfortunately, workplace assessments have gotten a bad rap. You’ve most likely been assessed to death and have participated in a number of assessments that didn’t result in much action or create the changes promised. Training application assessments (e.g., Kirkpatrick’s Level 3 Assessments) are no exception. Often, organisations decide to conduct this type of assessment as an afterthought, long after the training programme has been implemented; or they decide to conduct an ad hoc assessment in reaction to persistent, unsatisfactory project performance. However, using training application assessments in these ways may limit the value provided by the results if the assessments are not conducted properly. If reactive training application assessments seem to be the norm, how can you ensure your assessments provide valuable information for performance improvement?
This is the first in a series of blog postings designed to help you get the most out of training application assessments, regardless of when and how you use them, and ensure strong stakeholder support and participation. It’s not that assessments are a bad idea; it’s more about correctly identifying the purpose of the assessment, gathering stakeholder support and participation and establishing realistic expectations about how the findings should be interpreted in your workplace.
Apply these five principles to ensure you get maximum value from your training assessments.
1. Align Purpose With Situation
In the ideal world, organisations would build training application assessments into the design of their training programmes and conduct pre-training assessments to establish a skills baseline for post-training comparison. However, this typically doesn’t occur. Without a pre-training skills application baseline, it’s not really possible to evaluate the behavioural change that resulted from training attendance. With this in mind, when setting up an assessment, you must examine your current situation and decide what purpose the assessment can serve. Without a baseline assessment, the most an ad hoc training application assessment can provide is a current snapshot of the key components that encourage and sustain behavioural change.
Participants in successful, targeted training programmes:
• Know what to do and are doing it;
• Have a desire to change;
• Work in a supportive environment; and
• Are rewarded to change.
Training programmes accomplish the first two by providing the necessary knowledge and skills and by creating a positive attitude toward the desired change. The third component refers to the supportive environment created by the employee’s supervisor and overall organisation, and the fourth component refers to the internal and external rewards an employee receives from changing his or her behaviour.
2. Context is Key
Employees apply their skills learned in training within the context of the organisation to achieve some level of improvement in performance and project outcomes. Training application assessments are not meant to measure return on investment or improvement in business outcomes; however, without some relevant, high-level measure of performance outcomes, when presented with the findings, you may be left saying, “So what?” To avoid this reaction, training application assessment findings must be evaluated relative to how the work is performed in your organisation and validated against some measure of the outcomes being achieved on projects so you can answer the question, “What application level is appropriate in my organisation? 75%? 90%? 100%?”
Available benchmarks can help, but may not reflect the differences in the supportiveness of organisational environments that impact skills application. The benefits of training will be limited by unsupportive management, lack of project accountability, inconsistent project goals, lack of opportunities to apply skills, extreme workloads, ineffective tools and processes and by reward systems that don’t encourage and support desired behavioural changes.
Stay tuned for the remaining 3 principles in my next posting!