KQ Article

You might not want to hear this, but it’s a rare day when you can actually directly measure the influence of training on business performance. The truth is, significant training courses are often executed when there is a whole lot of other stuff going on. Most training coincides with product launches, marketing initiatives, mergers or revenue pushes, making it nearly impossible to isolate the effect of the training from all the other activity.

So how do you adequately measure the effectiveness of a specific training program at your bank or credit union? A new book has done much of this measuring for us, so that we can worry instead about finding the most effective training methods to deliver.

Required Reading
I recently finished Evidence Based Training Methods by Ruth Colvin Clark. Combined with my years of frustration trying to accurately measure the impact of a specific training initiative, this book has led me to focus my attention on employing the most effective training instead. I now simply have faith that my efforts are positively influencing business performance.

Measuring a specific training event is really not easy, nor that important. What you should measure is what kind of training works best. Colvin’s book identifies such training in great detail, with every assertion backed by extensive research. She has done the measuring for us. Evidence Based Training Methods is now required reading for my staff.

Many measurement results in the book contradict widely held conventional wisdom on training, which only reinforces my suspicion that our longstanding modes of measurement may be misleading. I found two findings in particular especially surprising.

First, it turns out that lecturing can be good. In a training world obsessed with virtual games and hyper-interactivity, evidence proves that the old-fashioned lecture works best for training that involves the transfer of vital knowledge, such as product or consumer demographics information.

Second, learning styles are overrated. In two case studies, students were placed into one of three categories based on assessed learning preference: visual, auditory or kinesthetic. Researchers expected close correlation between high scores and learning preference after testing these subjects, but the results found no relationship whatsoever.

Thanks to Clark, trainers don’t have to obsess so much over measurement anymore. Now you can spend more energy where it belongs: on finding the best training method for a specific training need.

_{© 2010 Mark McCarthy}

What are your thoughts about training and measurement? Share them with others below.