Blog Post: You had better develop and leverage your own business partnership model or you will soon be out of business!

In its heyday, my employer had a vibrant group of units focussing on Organizational Development.  There was even a unit that focussed solely on evaluating the performance of all the divisions within the company, painstakingly utilizing a systematic process to identify measurable objectives and track their success throughout the organization.

As the economy faltered and corporate leadership started looking at ways to cut expenses, the company experienced a round of layoffs.  Surprisingly, Training was not severely impacted.  The Evaluations team was.

When the second round of layoffs hit, Training was not so fortunate.

Some may find it predictable that the training staff was cut in half during the second round of layoffs.  After all, Training is often considered overhead; the fact that we weren't the first to go was just pure luck.
Or was it?

I believed then, and still do to this day, that the only reason Training survived the first round of layoffs was due to the efforts of the Evaluations team.  They had proven to the corporate leadership that Training was making a difference.  With that team gone, we had lost the only advocate willing to prove the department was little more than a cost center, and we did not pick up the slack in that effort.  Thus, layoffs.

As trainers in an economic slowdown, we're well aware of the tenuous hold we have on employment.  The anectdotes that Training is the first to go are almost cliche.  So we rage at the corporate machine, bemoaning its folly that it just doesn't recognize the difference that we make, and never will.

I tend to disagree with that last bit.  The corporate machine can, and will, recognize the input training has on the corporate bottom line if we, as trainers, take the steps necessary to bring it to their attention.  This goes beyond smile sheets, trainers.  It utilizes all four of Kirkpatrick's Levels of Evaluation.
To those unaware, 50 years ago a graduate student named Don Kirkpatrick developed the following four levels of evaluation:

Level 1 - reaction, or what training participants thought about the training program
Level 2 - learning, or what knowledge, skills, and attitudes were acquired through the training
Level 3 - behavior, or to what degree did participants apply on the job what they learned
Level 4 - results, or what results came to be from the training

Jim Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. (Don Kirkpatrick's son) has since paired those Levels of Evaluation with a Business Partnership Model that works to ensure that Business acknowledges the value of your training.  There's an article(from which I borrowed the title to this post) on this topic at the ASTD-OC website (here's a link to the page), but, perhaps even better, ASTD-OC is providing a chance to hear from Jim and Don Kirkpatrick about this very topic on Wednesday, April 30.

I believe that there's something to this evaluation process as a method of longevity, and for our company the secret left with the downsized Evaluations team.  I guess I'm lucky I've got the chance to uncover it again.