Strategic Training and Evaluation

Am attending this four day training program and the interesting part is that there are training managers and trainers from different organizations who are going through it.

A discussion that emerged today was about training becoming more and more strategic. A model stated that as training moves from mere administration to management, the evaluation screen becomes more and more. From training management one can move up to strategic HR - and the trick for training professionals then becomes to actually think outside their box and look at non-classroom development.

When more and more investment starts to happen in training, with senior leaders spending time getting trained the organization wants to see 'effectiveness of training'

Of course there are the 4 levels of Kirkpatrick's evaluation that goes from

1. Reaction 
2. Knowledge
3. Behavior 
4. Organizational Impact

 A point that the facilitator mentioned is that the trainer has more control on levels 1 and 2. However going to levels 3 and 4 is when it starts  to get quite muddled to isolate factors that the trainer had an impact on. It also requires more investment (in resources and people) to get to those levels.


Learning for the day: A trainer has to get out of his/her comfort zones and also to give up control. Hence moving towards facilitation and becoming a facilitator of learning is going to be key to success for learning and development professionals.

How many are ready for that?

It's so much easier to arrange an off the shelf training program that the business thinks it needs. Isn't it?