33: How to Use Strategy and Evaluation in Training, with Bonni Stachowiak
Apr 16, 2012
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Bonni Stachowiak, a professor and host of Teaching in Higher Ed, discusses the importance of strategy in training. Topics include aligning with organizational goals, needs analysis, and evaluating training effectiveness. Insights on creating competitive advantage and overcoming challenges in training evaluation are shared.
Strategic training alignment is essential for organizational success by linking learning goals with company objectives.
Thorough needs analysis is crucial to identify key organizational challenges and tailor training solutions effectively.
Deep dives
Aligning Training with Strategy for Organizational Success
It is vital for leaders to align training initiatives with the organization's long-term strategy, ensuring that learning objectives support the overall mission, vision, and goals. Organizations like Zappos exemplify this alignment by integrating customer service training into their core strategy, aiming to provide exceptional customer experiences across all interactions. Leaders are encouraged to ensure that training programs directly contribute to strategic objectives and avoid disconnected training efforts that lack alignment with the organization's overarching goals.
Conducting Effective Needs Analysis for Targeted Solutions
Leaders are advised to conduct thorough needs analyses before implementing training programs to pinpoint key organizational challenges that need to be addressed. By identifying specific problems that training can solve, engaging with stakeholders at various levels, and developing tailored solutions, leaders can ensure that training efforts are strategically aligned with tangible business objectives. Effective needs analysis lays the foundation for successful training programs that deliver measurable results.
Evaluating Training Impact through Formative and Summative Assessment
Assessing the impact of training programs involves both formative and summative evaluations to measure participant satisfaction and learning outcomes as well as behavioral changes and organizational results. While formative evaluations focus on immediate feedback and satisfaction levels, summative evaluations delve deeper into assessing long-term behavior changes and the overall impact on organizational success. By employing comprehensive evaluation strategies like Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation, leaders can gauge the effectiveness of training programs and make data-driven decisions to drive continuous improvement.
Encouraging Courage and Adaptability in Training Initiatives
Leaders are encouraged to embrace failure as a learning opportunity and demonstrate the courage to experiment, evaluate, and adapt training approaches based on outcomes. Overcoming the fear of failure allows leaders to take calculated risks, refine training strategies, and foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement. By promoting a mindset of agility and innovation in training design and evaluation, leaders can elevate the impact of learning initiatives and drive sustainable organizational growth.
Bonni Stachowiak: Teaching in Higher Ed
Bonni Stachowiak is the host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, a professor of business and management at Vanguard University, and my life partner. Prior to her academic career, Bonni was a human resources consultant and executive officer for a publicly traded company. She joins me monthly to respond to listener questions.
Be sure to align with the organization's mission, vision, and goals:
Requires that you have at least a basic understanding of strategy (long-term planning).
There are many approaches to strategy.
A good person to know about in the area of creating competitive advantage is Michael Porter.
Steps to needs analysis:
Determine the problem(s) by finding a key business lever that will make a big impact on the organization if it gets fixed/improved. People pay more attention to fixing problems than they do to making improvements.
Affirm that the problem really is the problem (work with stakeholders to see if there is consensus on the key problem(s); engage at all levels of the organization, as there can often be a disconnect between senior management and the line staff who typically engage directly with customers).
Develop solutions - training is not always the solution, though people tend to go to it as an "easier" way of addressing deeply rooted cultural issues.
Two broad types of evaluation:
Formative: satisfaction with the training itself. It is the most common form of evaluation conducted since it is the easiest and least expensive way to assess.
Summative: extent to which real change has occurred. This is the least common form of evaluation conducted because it is hardest and most expensive - but most important for determining whether ROI has occurred (Jack Phillips is a good person to read on the subject of training ROI).
Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation (Kirkpatrick is considered the "father" of training evaluation):
Reaction: people's reaction to the training; did they like it or not?
Learning: what knowledge was gained as a result of the training; what did people learn?
Behavior: the extent to which behavior was changed as a result of the training; what's different now?
Results: real and lasting change that occurred as a result of the training; what results have been achieved?
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