Product Description

Do you want to add value to your organisation through the
choices you make? By evaluating the return on your investment in learning,
you can add value to your organisation.

Collect and understand the essential baseline measures that will help you
to:
- work out your ROI;
- engage the learner;
- gain management commitment;
- build success into all training and development activities;
- prioritise resources to achieve the greatest value for your money; and
- enhance the credibility of the training team.

This book shows that effective evaluation isn't just about justifying your
job, it's about making value-based choices that will improve and strengthen
the impact of the training you provide.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21041 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Synopsis
If you don't know where you started, how can you tell how far you've come? If you concentrate on measuring how well people have learnt what you've taught them, then virtually all the training evaluation you have been doing is a waste of time. It will give you some great data on how good a trainer you are, but you have nothing to show how useful you are to the business. If you want to know how far you have travelled you have to take a tachometer reading before you start the journey. So it is with training evaluation - you have to collect baseline measures before you start the training. Once you understand this first rule of evaluation the subject becomes very simple.From this first principle, Paul Kearns builds a complete system that links all training directly to business needs. He shows how to use some simple tools to measure trainee performance and then put a financial value on it - so that trainees know how well they are doing and trainers start demonstrating how much value is being added by learning.

About the Author
Paul Kearns is Director of PWL, an HR and training evaluation
and measurement consultancy. He has worked in the field of HR, training,
development and learning since 1978 and began specialising in training
evaluation and ROI in 1991. He has a global reputation as both a
consultant, facilitator, trainer and conference speaker.

He has written several books on HR and training matters, all with a focus
on measuring benefits in terms of business results.

Customer Reviews

Business focused common sense on ROI
You know how the best ideas are simple common sense? This is one of them. Although Kearns acts all humble and won't put his name to the 'Baseline Model of Evaluation', it's his central big idea in this book.

Although I've attempted ROI studies using Jack Phillips' methodology, I questioned it after reading Robert Brinkerhoff's 'High Impact Learning' (another good book). Brinkerhoff calls on Phillips' practitioners to 'show me the money' if, for example, a time management programme delivers an 800% ROI valued at, say £200,000 - where does that appear on the bottom line? It doesn't.

Kearns makes the same point - and offers a more powerful alternative than Brinkerhoff's 'Success Case Evaluation'. His Baseline model takes a benchmark before any learning intervention (using an existing business measure), asks line managers the value of, say, a 1% improvement in this area, and then measures performance again after learning. Then attach the performance improvement to the value you've calculated. It's quick, easy and stands up to scrutiny.

Kearns' view on the hotly debated topic of 'attributability' is 'why bother?' Training can't ever PROVE it's impact; just like the marketing, sales or production department can't prove the performance improvement is down to them. Besides, why should training justify its existence? It should be an integral part of the team that moves the business forward.

Kearns has refreshingly provocative opinions on the relationship between line managers and training departments, the value of teambuilding, leadership development and corporate universities, and HR's fixation on buzzwords like competencies and e-learning.

This is a straight-talking book with incredible value for HR and Learning practitioners. Kearns offers a set of practical tools that can transform the business impact of an HR/Learning function. If you want to be taken seriously by colleagues in other departments and demonstrate a credible value-add on your activities, you should read this book.

Better than Philips
I've read Paul Kearns' articles on Training Zone and in other places for years now and he always seems to talk sense. He's not short of self-belief but then he has every right to be.

His basic premise is that if all you want to do is come up with a specious figure to justify your job the Philips' not so clever trick of putting a dollar sign after Kirkpatrick's model might be all you need (actually I don't think he'd say that - he seems to have it in for Philips).

However, if you want to actually build evaluation in to a training programme that will help your organisation perform better (and thereby become valuable enough to it that you don't need to constantly justify your existence!) then you need to do something a bit cleverer.

There are two fairly simple ideas here. The first is that you need to know where you want to get to and why. Ie what do you want your people to be better at and why will that add value to the organisation? That will help you know what to measure. Secondly, how good are they at it before you start on the fairly obvious but rarely recognised premise that how can you evaluate how successful training has been if you don't know how good (or bad) things were to start with - ie you need to start measuring the value added.

Frankly, this is the best book on training evaluation I've ever read.