I am pleased to send you the February 2008 E-News from SMR USA. As I finish work with a government agency in Missouri and head to Atlanta for the Training 2008 Conference & Expo, I can’t but hope there will be better weather in Atlanta. The Midwest has been having a real cold spell. The primary elections in the United States have all been exciting and with Super Tuesday just around the corner, everyone is glued to the news.
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In the back ground of all these exciting things, I want to share with you the exciting opportunity that I will have in Atlanta – working with Don and a panel of specialists on the Business Partnership Model. This is the first Conference within a Conference – the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Summit that SMR USA will be hosting with Training 2008. |
1. Working with Don
Don and I (Jim) enjoy partnering with organizations around the world that seem to understand the need for training functions to do a better job of meeting the needs of their internal and external business stakeholders. The American Management Association is one of those organizations. Don and I recently spent some time with our thought leaders in New York City, and while we were there, we recorded an interview led by AMA’s Annette Homan. Below are excerpts from that interview.
Dr. Donald L. Kirkpatrick’s four levels have become an industry standard for determining the effectiveness of any training initiative. I have continued his work on transforming learning into behaviors. We recently wrote a new book Implementing the Four Levels (Berrett-Koehler Publishing, 2007).
2. The new book
According to Don, the new book helps to clarify the role of managers in helping direct reports gain from learning initiatives. Besides having managers help to design programs, there is need to move beyond level one or reaction and level two or learning to level three or behavioral change. According to Don, research by the American Society for Training suggests that only 25% of learning programs consider level three.
In my opinion, the problem is that most companies are pretty much stuck in a pattern of doing level one and level two because they see themselves as training departments or corporate universities; they don’t recognize their role as business partners and believe that their responsibility ends when people leave the classroom.
3. Level Three
To me, level three is almost a missing link because nobody takes ownership of it. Business people say that they are in charge of results, which is level four. Training people say that they are in charge of levels one and two. Nobody is leveraging what I consider the most important level--level three--where the training gets executed.
There’s a gap--a big gap between the training and the business, with business people sending staff to training and then the training people train them and send them back to their jobs. There isn’t any good collaboration to make sure that the people trained apply what they learned in order for the business to achieve the results it anticipated when it sent its people to training.
Level three is making sure that people are applying the behaviors that they have learned that will bring about those results.
Let us continue our discussion on this subject next month. Meanwhile, make sure you follow the happenings at Training 2008 and be at the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Summit, the focus is on business partnership, this is a Conference within a Conference hosted by Training 2008 and SMR USA.
