2 Responses

1. Level 4 evaluation after training
   Hi Jayne

   Do you have before & after detailed performance data? If not I personally think this is impossible. Asking managers to evaluate at level 4 is difficult enough if they have:
   1) clearly identified needs
   2) a clear and stated expectation of what must happen differently after training
   3) an understanding of what it costs to deliver the service before training has taken place
   4) a detailed listing of what task took how long before training took place.

   I have only ever attempted level 4 evaluation on large scale training and only looked at level 3 on an individual basis.

   So without knowing your sector – lets take a call centre environment:

   Before training:
   how many ‘lost calls’
   how many call abandoned
   frequency of call to sale conversion
   average value of sale etc…
   average level of absence
   average cost of personnel per minute of calls taken

   then to calculate these after training.

   The only way to do this in my experience is to identify these measures BEFORE training has been undertaken. In other words it is the quality of your TNA that will dictate the level of evaluation able to be undertaken.

   Some good books include:
   skills of training – L Rae
   Diagnosing manaagement & development needs – ILO
   Evaluation – BEE
   Measuring management performance – Jackson

   Hope this is of some value
   Mike

2. Success Case Method
   Hi Jayne

   Ideally you’d like, as Mike pointed out, data on performance before and after training AND some idea as to the contribution training made to the performance increases.

   In my experience it is not difficult to do what you ask – Brinkerhoff’s Success Case Method is probably the best method to use here (Get his books on Amazon, or email me for a precis. I’m at martins@kaizen-training.com – also look at some of our free stuff on this subject – go to http://www.kaizen-training.com/free/tools_and_techniques.html)

   The challenge is in how you report your evaluation results. Again Brinkerhoff can help with this. In the absence of decent baseline data from before the training, and not knowing the relative contributions of the factors that drive this particular performance indicator, you can only look to anecdotal evidence, which may also include a few examples of solid proof that the training has had an impact.

   Happy to explain more off-line due to the word count limits here.

   Best wishes,

   Martin