Getting on with it

It didn't surprise me to read in December' s issue of TJ that evaluation was top of the agenda at last year's TJ conference. Large amounts of time and money are invested by private and public sector organisation's each year training their staff. It is hardly surprising that those organisations want to see whether there is a return on their investment. What is surprising perhaps is how few actually evaluate. Those that do overwhelmingly evaluate learning rather than performance outcomes. Probably less than three per cent assess impact on outcomes.

There are, of course, lots of reasons why L&D professionals should evaluate training. Evaluation means that you can identify ways of improving programmes, you can assess whether training is in fact enhancing employee's knowledge, skills and attitudes, whether learning is being transferred into improved job performance, the opportunity cost of investing in one training programme can be compared to another and evaluation has even been shown to reinforce prior learning. Without evaluation, particularly when times are tough there is a real danger that training will be seen as just a cost and therefore ripe for trimming back.

If though evaluation is such a good thing why is so little of it going on? There are it seems a lot of reasons. These range from lack of capacity and organisational support to a lack of evaluation tools that deliver the goods (see the article in this month's TJ). There is also what academics describe as the 'research-to-practice' gap. Far too often academic work is isolated from the reality of practitioners. Hard to access, understand and apply models of evaluation are of little use to busy L&D professionals coping with the realities of working in organisations.

This is a shame because there is a lot of good research out there - a mountain of it in fact. This is where I hope in a small way this blog comes in. I work in a university. The main focus of my research is training evaluation. I am interested in how practitioners can evaluate their training in a way that produces not only reliable results but also in ways that are user-friendly.

I spend a lot of my time trying to keep up to date with the latest research on training from the fields of economics, sociology, human resource management, occupational psychology, performance management, evaluation and learning theory. Over the coming months I want to share some of this research with TJ readers. My hope is that this will help you, in the words of December's TJ article 'just do it!' - evaluation that is.

Richard Griffin is Director of the Institute of Vocational Learning at London South Bank University. He can be contacted at: griffir3@lsbu.ac.uk