Measuring Employee Development

A few months ago I was asked to provide an independent assessment of an employee training initiative. In speaking with the people in charge of the training efforts, I learned that they were aware of, and roughly using Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation.

They had created a typical "smile sheet" (an evaluation that asks if people liked the training - level 1) and managed to collect feedback from every training session. They did not, however, have a solid method for measuring whether or not the training sessions were actually moving people towards changes in behavior (level 3) and subsequently wholesale organizational change (level 4).

I decided to conduct my own assessment of the training efforts to determine to what level the training was leading to true development. Through a series of interviews, focus groups, and surveys I learned that the training was not leading to effective organizational change. We are working on that problem now.

There has been an interesting trend however. During the same time that we are measuring the effectiveness of the training, we are also looking at overall employee engagement. Like most organizations, this organization has about 20-25% of its employees who can be classified as highly engaged - - the rest fall into the categories of slightly disengaged, to fully disengaged.

Here is the kicker! During the latest engagement survey 72% of the employees ranked in the categories related to disengagement. At the same time, the latest training assessment shows that 72% of the employees are not moving past level 1 in regards to the training efforts. So, the same percentage of employees who are disengaged are also not gaining nor providing value from the training, in essence training dollars are being wasted on nearly 3/4 of the employees. This seems like common sense, however, there are rarely connections like this made in organizations and it could mean a tremendous savings in costs associated with employee development.

This is a study in progress - - I have added a few more organizations into the mix to see if the numbers are similar. I will report the results as the become available.