Measuring the effectiveness of training

This article was written for my regular management column for IT Training magazine.

Word count: 720 words

Judging by the majority of unsolicited (and frankly dubious) e-mails which I receive daily, humans are obsessed with size, measurement and numbers. Perhaps it starts in the playground, with 'my dad is bigger than your dad' or when you're the proud owner of a conker that's won twenty games - who knows? But, as we grow older, numbers remain a central part of the way that we evaluate things and then make decisions. In how many seconds can a car get from nought to sixty? What's its top speed? How many gigahertz and how much RAM in that PC? How many calories in that cake? How many settings on that washing machine? What's its fastest spin-cycle?

Even for a mathematical Muppet like me, numbers are important. Crikey, I even know that I am five-foot seven and three-quarter inches tall (no, not five-foot seven: that last three-quarter inches, really, really matters) and my left foot is half a size bigger than my right. See, numbers matter, even to me, who can seldom add-up a column of numbers and reach the same total twice.

In business today, numbers have the ultimate say. Jonathan Wall, marketing director at e-retailer dabs.com recently told me that he only undertakes marketing initiatives that can be precisely measured. This means that most of dabs.com's marketing is on line, since, not only can they measure it precisely, the results are instant. It's not that other forms of marketing are bad - but these can be relied on.

Jonathan's not alone in his thinking - many businesses operate many of their functions in this way. (Okay, so there's a valid counter-argument that says doing everything by numbers stifles new thinking: after all, if the Beatles had to audition in front of a focus group, I doubt that they'd have ever cut vinyl. While this is probably true, it's a digression.)

Training departments have escaped measurement for a long time. A recent survey, conducted by KnowledgeAdvisors in Chicago, found that around 70% of companies don't measure the business impact of training. Frankly, I think that they need to do their numbers again - I'd take some convincing that as many as 30% of businesses do actually measure training's business impact.

The groundswell to measure training has been a long time coming: a low rumble of discontent that we've heard for over a decade, but which has generally been muffled by claims of 'it's too difficult' or 'too expensive'.

Well, I'm sorry guys, but the sound of that groundswell is, as Agent Smith puts it, 'the sound of inevitability'. This type of measurement is going to happen. It's not a question of 'if', or even 'when', but simply 'how' - this is something companies want now. Today. When you see BT and Microsoft adopting a tool like Global Learning Alliance's Metrics That Matter, you know that the subject has gone primetime.

To be honest, although this might involve some scary change, this is only bad news if you choose not to embrace it. The (not unnatural) fear is that detailed statistics will adversely change the focus of training - perhaps removing the 'touchy-feely stuff'. I'm sure that's true - some good initiatives/processes/tools/media may well be dropped, in favour of those things which can be measured. But - on the plus side - those things that can be measured will, by their nature, be 'stuff that works'. Darwinian selection, sure, but there is a massive upside.

Every single number, every percentage, every statistic gathered by such systems is a solid argument for training. Used correctly, tools like Metrics That Matter will enable training departments not only to assess the business impact from a training programme, but also predict the business impact from proposed programmes. They will enable suppliers and in-house teams to be ranked and selected on performance. They will enable improvements to be targeted against business need - and, ultimately, they will enable organisations to understand not only the value of training, but the value of what the yanks call their 'human capital' and what we call our 'people'. Many business leaders say that their workforce is their biggest asset - these kinds of measurement tools enable such claims to be quantified.

The only fly in the ointment that I can see is that it gives those darned accountants even more control - as if they needed it, for goodness sake.