By Krysty Wideen

As I mentioned, I went to a course called “Measuring and Evaluating Learning” as part of my quest to measure the impact our leadership development programs have on our clients’ business. I’m still processing the three-day information dump, but I thought I would share my biggest take away from the course.

It sounds so simple, and yet, it is often overlooked. No matter what, any learning initiative in your organization has to start with a business need. How you define your need will determine how you can measure the impact.

For example, say that people in your organization are spending increasing amounts of time in meetings, and this is slowing down production. A need is identified – to decrease the amount of time spent in meetings. You could launch a training program that helped people be more purposeful about the meetings they call and how they are conducted. Then, to measure the impact of this investment, you can simply look back to your business need. How much time are people spending in meetings after the training (in comparison to before)? Has production started to rise?

The key message here is that evaluation starts BEFORE the learning initiative does. If evaluation is an afterthought, it will never be able to truly measure the impact. It has to be something you consider from Day 1.

So, how do you write really good objectives for your initiative that address the business need and inform your evaluation?

Krysty Wideen is a learning and organizational development consultant with The Refinery Leadership Partners, based in Vancouver. Her professional interest and expertise is in emotional intelligence, type psychology (MBTI), conflict, team dynamics, learning design, and program evaluation. An emerging practitioner in her field, Krysty is actively seeking new information, ideas, insights, and experiences and loves to share them with the online community through the BCHRMA and Refinery Leadership Partners Blogs.