We must conceive and manage training as an inseparable part of performance improvement and management. Training is a process that involves dynamic inter­relationships with the other functions of the organization, especially supervisors, managers and performance management systems. These functions can then work in harmony to produce suc­cessful performance.

The success of this dynamic interrelationship depends on forming cooperative alliances among training leaders and the other key players, such as line managers, supervisors, trainees, and other human resources professionals. This process works well at Canadian Tire Financial Services where managers and employees at all levels of the organization routinely meet to discuss and clarify the linkage among individual learning plans, employee aspirations for career growth, and manager’s business objectives. Learning plans are created that integrate these elements into a seamless performance improvement process where business impact is both assured and obvious to all stakeholders.

Under the old paradigm employees are sent for new learning and refresher courses in the hopes that when they return to work, they will work better and smarter. This old mental model underlies the train­ing delivery system, where training staff create, or buy from vendors, training programs that are delivered as stand-alone “events” to group after group of employees. Finally, someone asks whether all this activity and expense is making a difference.
 
When these training programs don’t work, both they and often the staff who designed them are blamed. Training budgets, staff, and structures are shuffled or cut back. But underneath the shuffled staff and the new vendors and the trimmed budgets lies the old event-view of training. As long as the old mental model prevails, all such efforts end in marginal improvements at best. “Smile sheet reactions may improve for a while and attendance may temporarily surge but nothing moves favorably on the bottom line.

Toward a New Training Management and Evaluation Paradigm

Effective training is not an event, it is a process. This process must involve all of the key stake-holders and be driven by a clear view of their business needs. Along with a new process approach to training, a thoughtful and constructive evaluation strategy that closely integrates performance improvement principles and methods is needed. Evaluation throughout the process, not just at the end, will assure high impact, low cost and efficient training.

The best that training alone can do is improve employee capability. It is managers who must then pick up the ball and help build improved capability into sustained performance improvement and business results. To accomplish this, a learning solution should have three key elements:

1. A dialogue between employees and managers that creates a sharp focus and shared agreement on performance improvement objectives and that clearly links intended learning to these performance objectives and the business goals to which they are meant to contribute.

2.  Active learning interactions that include skill practice in job-like scenarios with measurement and feedback.

3. Methods and tools for managers to nurture new learning and support performance improvement with encouragement, coaching and feedback.
 
Evaluation of training should monitor and assess how much and how well each of the three elements above are planned and implemented. Then, it should carefully gauge what is working and what is not, documenting performance and business results when they occur, and troubleshooting causes of failure when such outcomes are not being achieved. Evaluation should ask:

• What learning, how much, and how well, is actually being applied on the job?
• What improved job, performance, and business results are being achieved?
• What are managers doing to support and reinforce the transformation of learning into improved performance?
• What systemic obstacles, impediments and facilitating factors interact with performance?
• What new needs are emerging?

By building learning interventions that pay attention to the realities of how learning must work hand-in-glove with managers to improve performance, training can help achieve huge dividends in improved business results. By focusing on a systemic approach to evaluation which actively involves managers as partners with the training department, organizations can build shared ownership for the learning-performance process. When it works, they can celebrate joint successes; when it does not, they can work together to understand why and make needed improvements. And finally, by building on the knowledge this inquiry creates, organizations can build capability to continuously leverage learning investments into improved business performance.

Robert Brinkerhoff, Ed.D. is a world recognized expert in training effectiveness and evaluation. He consults with dozens of major firms in the United States and around the world. He is the co-developer with Dennis Dressler of High Impact Learning Systems®.
 
Glenn Jackson is the president and co-founder of Advantage Performance Group (APG), the world’s largest and fastest growing human performance consulting network.