STAGE 1 - Improving Workplace Education Evaluation

OBJECTIVES

The purpose of Stage 1 is to help you:

• Understand the importance of properly evaluating your workplace education efforts, including workplace basic skills;
• Understand Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation (Response, Learning, Performance, Results) and the ways in which one can move from Level 1 to Level 4;
• Understand the benefits - operationally and financially - of improving workplace education evaluation;
• Appreciate all of the things that can be measured (metrics) to judge the effect of workplace education efforts;
• Begin applying principles of higher-level workplace education evaluation (measuring impact on business goals) to your own organization;
• Prepare for Stage 2 - taking a Balanced Scorecard approach, and Stage 3: creating your own Balanced Scorecard.

The overarching objective of ScorecardforSkills.com is to provide action-oriented information to employers about workplace education programs so that they can make better decisions about which investments to make and to understand how to align these to organizational strategy.

Before you can think about aligning your workplace education efforts to organizational strategy, you must first be able to evaluate how your workplace education programs have an impact on the broader organization. This is true whether you are assessing and addressing basic workplace skills gaps, or higher-level technical or managerial skills gaps. This stage will help you understand how to do this.

Before beginning this Stage, you may wish to fill in the current practice survey a survey to evaluate your current practice, to determine where your organization is currently as compared to best practices in workplace education evaluation. Our hope is that you fill out the survey now and return to it later to see how you have improved in this area.