STAGE 2 - Balanced Scorecard for Skills

OBJECTIVES

The purpose of Stage 2 is to help you:

• Understand the importance of aligning workplace education – from workplace basic skills right up to required managerial competencies - to overall business strategy;
• Understand Norton and Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard approach to measuring performance in four areas (Financial, Customer, Internal, and Learning and Innovation);
• Understand the benefits - operationally and financially - of aligning workplace education with Balanced Scorecard measures;
• Appreciate all of the things that can be measured (metrics) to judge the effects of workplace education on Balanced Scorecard measures;
• Prepare for Stage 3, where you can begin aligning your own organization's workplace education to your own Balanced Scorecard measures.

Stage 2 will help you understand the basics of a Balanced Scorecard approach. Your organization may not use a Balanced Scorecard at this time. If it does not, you can begin with this primer, the concepts presented in this Stage and the tools we provide to you in Stage 3. Even if your organization does not plan on producing a formal Balanced Scorecard, you can still use the framework to align your workplace education programs to those things that your organization values and manages.

Before beginning this Stage, you may wish to fill in the Current Practice Survey to determine where your organization is compared to industry practices in workplace education evaluation. Our hope is that you return and do the survey later to see how you have improved in this area.