You're only as professional as your evidence, says Paul Kearns. Happy sheets are all very well, he says, but you need to get the basics right at the beginning if evaluation is to mean anything at all.
It might be stating the blindingly obvious but the best learning professionals are surely those that produce the best evidence that their methods are effective.
If that is true, then poor evidence - or a complete lack of evidence - has to be an equally clear indicator of the unprofessional. So how do we spot the difference?
"Looking for evidence of team building effectiveness after the event is much too late in the process: most of the opportunities for learning the really important, organisational lessons will already have been missed."Let's look at one very common intervention - team building – to illustrate what sort of evidence a 21st Century learning professional who subscribes to the Oath would need to offer.
I guess most team building specialists would point to their satisfied customers - happy sheets or even some survey from team members that the team is now 'better'. Would such data qualify as evidence? Well it might do but the test for a 21st Century learning professional goes much further back into the whole process.
The starting point is never the team building event itself; or even a discussion about the possibility of a team building activity. No, it always starts from an analysis of the strategic direction of the organisation. Is the organisation planning to grow, diversify, focus on new product development, become a cost leader or what? If you are running a team building event, can you trace its conception right back to this point? If so, you have just satisfied the first test of professionalism.
The second test, after the strategic analysis phase, is a gap analysis. This always asks the question 'where is the organisation likely to struggle to achieve its strategic objectives?'.
The gap analysis itself will be based on an organisational performance analysis. For example, if cost leadership is one of the key issues, which parts of the organisation (region, division, country, department) have a poor track record on cost reduction and control?
At this point there has to be some measurable evidence introduced (comparative cost figures in £'s). If the strategic issue is less tangible (e.g. poor customer focus) then there still has to be some indicator (e.g. shopper experience surveys) that confirms the issue has been correctly identified, actually exists and is fully acknowledged by the relevant management.
Are you still following this? Or has your team building event already failed on any of these crucial, evidence-based indicators? If it has, then producing happy sheets to show the team enjoyed the awayday already looks like very weak 'evidence' and pretty meaningless.
Only when you get to this stage, agreeing the evidence with managers and their teams, can the 21st Century learning professional do what conventional (20th Century) learning theory has always demanded – a learning needs analysis.
This will always have to be a root cause analysis (what are the root causes of our inability to keep our costs down?) followed swiftly by a cause and effect analysis (is one of the causes that we do not work well together as a team in identifying and resolving ways to reduce costs?).
Only after all of these questions are answered can you, at last, suggest a discussion about the possibility of a learning intervention as an integral part of the solution to an original, business need.
The 21st Century learning professional knows that this is the only way to introduce evidence-based learning into organisations. A professional, learning intervention is always an early, strategic intervention, not a team playing games together on an awayday, without a clear outcome anticipated. Looking for evidence of team building effectiveness after the event is much too late in the process: most of the opportunities for learning the really important, organisational lessons will already have been missed.
These are the fundamental, general principles that can be applied to any attempt to help people in organisations to learn, whether it involves management competence or leadership development. They are also equally applicable to both external training providers (they are not professional, learning providers until they produce evidence of applied learning) and internal learning specialists.
So, do you already satisfy these tests or is this the sort of professional challenge that would make you proud to call yourself a learning professional? If you are convinced this is the way forward then the next step, in next month's piece, will be to explore how we convince the 'line' that professional learning means they have to completely re-think their whole attitude to training and development.
The 21st Century learning professional will certainly never sanction a demand for sheep-dip or knee-jerk training without a fight.
Striving to be a true learning professional can feel very lonely at times - the number of readers who have contacted me is extremely small and so far the tally of those actually declaring the Oath currently stands at an amazing zero. Nevertheless, I still hope that by the end of this series I will have found at least a small, dedicated, nucleus that will want to become the first 21st Century learning professionals. Of course, I might also unearth someone willing to offer a better alternative?
Read his last feature The 21st Century learning professional: Let battle commence This feature first appeared on TrainingZone in May 2008
Paul Kearns specialises in measuring the value of the human contribution to organisational success and teaches real evaluation around the world. He is the author of the CIPD's best selling 'Evaluating the ROI from Learning' and has campaigned for many years to raise professional standards. Visit www.paulkearns.co.uk
