The office is all aflutter in anticipation of our Fall Symposium. Even though I’m busy preparing for interviews, I wanted to take a minute to think about this year’s theme, “Measuring Success: Learning’s Positive Impact on Business.”
In many interviews with learning leaders, this seems to be a recurring theme. People in the industry keep telling me how important it is to measure the impact of learning, but when I ask how they’re doing it, they hesitate.!@! Some organizations are measuring participants’ reactions. Other organizations are assessing participants’ learning. Still others evaluate if participants are transferring the skills they learned to the job. But few reach that evasive fourth level of Kirkpatrick’s model, the level that ties learning to the bottom line. So it’s the age-old question: How do you evaluate learning in a way that ties it to bottom-line results?
What are your thoughts on this debate? How do you measure impact on the business? Stay tuned for insights next week on how learning leaders at the Symposium are answering these same questions.
