STAGE 3 - Balanced Scorecard for Skills

APPLICATION - My Balanced Scorecard

Aligning My Workplace Education Efforts with My Balanced Scorecard

Now it is time to start applying the principles of higher-level approaches to evaluating your workplace education and aligning these efforts with your overall organizational goals and objectives in a Balanced Scorecard framework.

The Balanced Scorecard Worksheet that you have filled in, Click here to download this document in Word (.doc) format (or right click the link and save "target as" or "link as" to your drive), if you wish to edit it for your own use. (Please note that some browser versions may prompt you to "Enter a Network Password" before downloading . Simply click"cancel" to proceed with the download.) above should clearly set forth your organization's key objectives, measures, and targets along the four Balanced Scorecard indices (Financial, Customer, Internal Business Processes, and Learning and Innovation). The last column in the worksheet, titled "Initiatives", should have clearly laid out plans of what needs to take place to achieve your targets.

These initiatives may include new processes, new technology, the acquisition and application of new knowledge, etc. A key facet to help ensure successful implementation of these new initiatives is workplace education - whether in-house, contracted, or public programs - that will provide your employees with the knowledge and skills necessary to properly implement these new initiatives and reach your Balanced Scorecard targets. Again, keep in mind that workplace education efforts will have an obvious role to play in the Learning and Innovation category of your Balanced Scorecard, but that they can also play a key role in helping your organization achieve targets in the other three categories (Financial, Customer, and Internal Business Processes).

Just as precise measurement is important to validate organizational performance and progress toward achieving stated Balanced Scorecard targets, it is also important for being able to make any claims with respect to the effectiveness of your workplace education efforts in helping you reach these targets. In other words, you must put in place a solid evaluation plan for your workplace education efforts in order to establish any cause-and-effect relationships between these efforts and achievement of Balanced Scorecard targets. The worksheet on the following page will help you organize your thoughts in this regard.