What is your number 1 grip about evaluation?
Is it the attitude of your clients - internal or external - characterised by wanting the results without putting the effort in?
Is it that clients don't want an evaluation - and then come back to you some time later - wanting an evaluation - to be done by YOU so you can justify your fee and intervention to them?
Is it that there are so many models and methods out there that sterring a way through them to get to the right tool for you is difficult?
Is it that you and/or your clients don't fully appreciate the skills/tools needed to do anything more than a level 1 'happy sheet' evaluation?
Is it something else?
I'm doing a short 1hr session on this at a UKHRD networking meeting tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure others will have a view too!
Cheers
Martin
Martin Schmalenbach
2 Responses
Gripes about evaulation
Martin
My main gripe is trying to get managers involved in the pre and post parts of the whole process, not just evaluation. They seem to think it’s L&D’s responsibility and they just hand their people over and expect the ‘finished product’ to come out at the end. At the opposite end of the spectrum, at one company I worked for, I sat down with the board in the planning stages of a company-wide programme and we decided who was going to be involved, what form the evaluation was going to take, what to evaluate and over what period (some of the measures would not be fully apparent for a year). As a result, there was complete buy-in from all levels of management and I think that helped the success of the programme.
Hope this helps.
Getting ‘hard’ benefits from ‘soft’ development
It seems too easy for some clients to set aside the need for RoI because what we have because what we have been delivering was ‘soft skills’. I consistently suggest that one key business reason we develop soft skills is to help the participants be more effective at hard business outcomes – all to little avail!
OK, if the client dosn’t want evaluation then that’s ultimately their choice. My problem is that I cannot then use that delivery experience as effectively when selling to more hard-nosed clients.
Woe is me!