Knowledge Infusion Center of Excellence: Consultant's Corner : Tags : learning

In speaking with a lot of learning and development professionals lately, I hear that a lot of them are not concerned with 'butts-in-seats' for classroom training or 'eyeballs' or completions for online courses. Rather they are concerned with more strategic measures such as knowledge transfer and ROI. Some of them have even relegated attendance to a lowly Level 0 on Kirkpatrick's famous 4-level impact scale, which starts at level 1, stating that such reports are useless.

I think this view is a little extreme. In fact, I think that while 'butts-in-seats' as a measure is transactional, it is foundational in that it can lend strategic insights into the value of learning investments and lead to better decisions on how to allocate those investments going forward. For instance:

It matters to a Chief Compliance Officer that every manager took part in the sexual harassment training. Without any needed proof of knowledge transfer or understanding in any state of which I am aware (sad), attendance is all you really have.
Several senior business leaders with whom I've spoken want to know that their potential successors are taking part in the accelerated leadership development programs they were involved in designing for the good of the long-term health of the company.
The head of product marketing wants to know that all salespeople and channel partners have sat through training on the new black-box, which is now available for sale 4 weeks ahead of the company's nearest competitors' black-box.
The head of customer training is concerned about butts-in-seats because its directly tied to the top line of her P&L. She is also interested in the average price charged per learner.
The CLO cares because he wants to know what courses are in high-demand and which ones should be put out to pasture.

While I don't subscribe to obsessing over transactional measures like attendance or training departmental measures such as how much you spend on catering, I do feel that you do need spend some time tracking them in order to tie training to business value via quality and efficiency. I'd love to hear how you're approaching your T&D measurement strategy.

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I stumbled across an article recently in MacWorld (link below) about an Australian software company that is enabling its Learning Management System to operate on iPhones and iPods. The company - ETech - is focusing its StudyWiz application on the education market for starters. The software will allow students to access media-rich content, take tests, submit assignments, or use social media like blogs.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/education/news/index.cfm?newsid=19758&pagtype=allchand ate

It's only a matter of time before these mobile learning platforms become prevalent in the corporate world as well. These types of mobile technologies are particularly useful to businesses like retail where workforces are scattered across far-flung store locations. Knowledge Infusion has worked with several retail clients in the past year that had been considering offering some type of learning via iPods. The iPhone just adds more potential functionality at the employees fingertips.

The vast majority of retail store employees don't have dedicated desks - let alone PC's - that would alllow them to complete online learning en masse. This technology could solve that dilemma by putting learning directly into the hands of employees where and when they need it. You can imagine a retail employee roaming the store floor, pulling up product specific information on an iPod or iPhone to learn how best to sell the products to customers. This also could link store employees across the organization together by enabling them to network (i.e. blogs, wikis) to share product sales tips and other information.

I've been skeptical of complex business transactions (i.e. not just buying an iTune or sending a text message) moving to a mobile phone platform. I think the challenge is the user interface and creating applications that are easy to use given the miniscule space to present the user interface. But the iPhone and iPod certainly could be used to make valuable information available to employees and allow them to pull from it where and when they need it.