Developing Human Capital: Using Analytics to Plan and Optimize Your Learning and Development Investments

Chapter 2The Need for a Strategy

If you don’t know where you are headed, you’ll probably end up someplace else.

—Douglas J. Eder, PhD

Now that you understand the major forces affecting your changing workforce, you should see how crucial it is to have a strategy for investing in, understanding, and inspiring your most valuable asset—your people. Organizations are stepping up to the challenge with more deliberate and intentional strategies for talent development. The best of these learning strategies include a measurement strategy as well. Such learning leaders recognize the importance of the guidance and feedback that measurement can provide. Useful measurement grows out of alignment with business goals, which are critical from the outset of planning curricula and designing courseware. Each phase of measurement serves a unique purpose, following the progression of the learning initiative from design to launch and all the way through to its impact on the business.

Initial measures of utilization or throughput help to determine completion rates and compliance. Measure progress through student determine reactions and learning transfer to determine if learners are applying their training once they get back on the job. Ultimately, measurement leads to isolating training’s impact, both to prove and to improve the value of the initiative.

By implementing a measurement strategy, learning organizations are able to integrate the intelligence gained through measurement into their planning. ...