Whether you’re developing and delivering a learning initiative, or improving your L&D processes, we all know we should measure the success of what we’re doing. Clear benchmarks, clear goals, compelling evidence of the logic of us doing more with bigger budgets for the betterment of our organisation.
Often we don’t though…. No benchmark to measure off, too many qualitative outcomes that can’t be measured, no time or money… That thinking is a trap. The brutal reality is the blended learning takes investment. If you can’t present a coherent argument for investing to get return, you’re consigned to forever making do with what you have. Forget building the plane as you fly along, you haven’t even got time to buy a second hand engine.
And actually, it is doable. Whether you use an A3 planner, or a cloud based measurement system (yes we do have both), it’s still about:
Being clear about
- Why you’re evaluating (improve the experience, understand the return, advocate)
- Who will use the information, to what end
- The value you’re aiming to measure
We think that a lot of people are scared off because they think the time and effort they’d need to spend to get something useable is too much. A couple of comments about that:
- Almost always, they seem to underestimate the usefulness of the evaluation to their longer term vision
- You can scale it to fit. Our cloud based evaluation tool is set up for online survey across multiple roles with live data analysis across a mix of dimensions (loosely, Kirkpatrick levels one, three and four with our own shiny new dimension). Our A3 template keeps you focused on what you actually need to do get the specific information you need.
Like anything, good evaluation process is a learned skill which you won’t develop without practice. Time to hop on the bike.