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STAGE 1 - Improving
Workplace Education Evaluation
BACKGROUND
Investment in people is a critical success factor for organizations.
Yet unlike, say, investments in plant and equipment, there
is rarely an effort made to evaluate the effectiveness of
workplace education on the key performance metrics of the
business. When evaluation is done, it tends to be about the
education process as opposed to the impact on the organization.
This approach may lead to workplace education investments
being downgraded in the estimation of managers outside of
the human resource function. Moreover, even for human resource
professionals, a weak evaluation system may limit their ability
to make sound workplace education investments and to demonstrate
their broader relevance to the organization.
ScorecardforSkills.com seeks to address this weakness
by providing you with the analytical tools to improve your
evaluation and to link it to organizational strategy.
Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation
In the late 1950's, D.L. Kirkpatrick developed what has become
one of the most popular models for evaluating workplace education
programs. Kirkpatrick's system has four levels of evaluation.
Figure 1
| Level |
|
What
the Level Measures |
| 1 |
Response |
Was the employee satisfied
with the workplace education and did employee complete
it? |
| 2 |
Learning |
What did the employee learn
from the workplace education program? |
| 3 |
Performance |
How did the workplace education
program affect employee performance? |
| 4 |
Results |
Did improvements in employee
performance attributable to workplace education affect
organizational performance? |
As one progresses from level 1 through to 4, the capability
to link workplace education to organizational results improves.
If your organization is stuck at level one evaluation, don't
feel bad…research shows that the vast majority of organizations
undertake this level of evaluation.
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