Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts, can be counted...
Albert Einstein
Evaluation and Quality Assurance
Evaluation and Quality Assurance are key activities in assessing:
Whether the learning programmes are delivering the required outcomes
Assessing the impact of these outcomes upon organisational performance (is the learning having the desired effect?)
Is the learning activity current and has it taken in to account the changes in your organisation’s environment (internal and external)?.
The learning process as a whole. How can it be improved?
What can we do to support you?
We can design an organisation evaluation strategy that meets your organisation’s requirements, taking in to account geographical spread, time constraints placed on your personnel, and willingness of staff to engage in surveys, questionnaires which can be a problem.
We can carry out training evaluations, either immediate internal training evaluations to gauge the impact of learning on your employees or carry out a broader external evaluation that looks to assess the impact of the learning in the workplace.
We can carry out a Return on Investment (ROI) assessment of a training programme to understand what the basic value or added value is for the training.
We can run workshops with your training specialists to help staff develop internal skills on conducting evaluations that will help them to carry out training evaluations in the longer term.
Top Tips
Here are some tips which we hope will help if you are looking at evaluating the learning activities within your organisation.
Be clear on the level of the evaluation you are going to carry out. If you want to measure the effect on business performance make sure you carry out an evaluation that assesses how the learning activities are supporting business needs.
Make sure the evaluation you are carrying out has a specific purpose. In our experience a large number of evaluations are carried out with little or no follow up activity. As a result evaluations become tick box exercises and are a waste of resources, and become meaningless, devaluing the process, rather than helping to ensure that learning activities underpin business capability.
Learning Needs Analysis, if carried out properly should provide clear learning outcomes directly linked to business requirements. As such these should form the framework for the evaluation, if you are seeking to measure performance. It will help to assess whether the learning need has been met, whether the capability gap has been addressed, and ultimately whether the business need has been fulfilled.
The data gathering activities for the evaluation must be suited to your organisation. Failure to address this will result in limited data to support the evaluation and as a result the evaluation will not provide meaningful results. Some areas to consider: What is the structure of your organisation? Is your organisation geographically spread? What budget do you have to carry out the data gathering? Are the stakeholders you want to engage easy to access? How well are questionnaires received in your organisation? Will your IT system or Learning Management System support the survey? Check on security requirements, for example if you want to use data gathering software such as survey monkey?
Use a variety of data gathering methods, don’t just resort to questionnaires, particularly if there is ‘questionnaire fatigue’ and therefore low response rates within your organisation. Try looking at alternative sources and methods for collection, taking account of organisational constraints such as geographical location, cost, available resources for example.
