How to Start Creating Your L&D Measurement Strategy
Is your head spinning with how to measure for your L&D programs and initiatives? Mine was too.
I remember it well; I had intentionally given myself the goal to create and execute an overall measurement strategy for my L&D function within a year. I knew measurement was important, but I was struggling. My thought was that making this a performance goal would force me to dive into something that made my head spin, instead of continuing to put it off in favor of other initiatives.
It was the thing I really didn't want to do.
Not because I thought I couldn't. I knew I was smart enough. I knew about Kirkpatrick and Phillips and their levels of evaluation. I had even used them in my graduate projects and thesis study. But doing this in an organization, for an entire team, had me stumped. Despite my knowledge, I honestly didn't even know where to start.
Somehow, I remembered the quote by tennis legend Arthur Ashe:
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
Step 1: A Measurement Audit
In the spirit of "start where you are," I decided to conduct a measurement audit. Not an audit intended to determine where corrections needed to be made or what wasn't working, but an audit to get my arms around what already existed.
After all, it wasn't that we weren't measuring. We definitely had measures in place here and there. They just weren't pulled together in a comprehensive strategy, it was tough to know who was doing what, and therefore, I couldn't even identify gaps or duplication. I needed a benchmark.
So, I began combing through our existing work to find all the places we were currently measuring, as well as the performance measures we had access to, and I asked every team member to do the same. We created a comprehensive list of everything from evaluative surveys to quality scores.
Step 2: Organize Findings into Three Categories
Inspired by the book, Measurement Demystified: Creating Your L&D Measurement, Analytics, and Reporting Strategy by David Vance and Peggy Parskey. I took all the measures the team had gathered and sorted them into three categories:
Efficiency Measures: Also called activity measures, these answer questions about how many, how much (time/money), and how often.
Effectiveness Measures: These measures tell us whether L&D solutions are helping people learn new knowledge or change their behavior.
Outcome Measures: These measures show an impact on overall business goals and initiatives.
As I sorted, I also included who owned the measure and how often it was calculated. The template I followed looked something like this:
Step 3: Questions For Your Findings
It's amazing what the process of running a measurement audit and sorting the results revealed. First off, it made me feel a lot better than I had at the beginning of the project. I was paralyzing myself unnecessarily. Turns out, we had way more measures than I thought, we just hadn't pulled them together in a comprehensive and strategic way.
Secondly, with the findings sorted into categories, I was now able to ask a few more questions to determine our next steps.
Do we have measures in all three categories? Which category or categories are lacking? What information might we need to populate them?
Do we have outcome measures tied to each of the projects that align with the company’s overall strategic goals/initiatives?
Does every measure on this list help us to make informed business decisions?
Do we have systems or processes in place to regularly gather and analyze the measures we need?
Off and Running!
With the audit complete, the results sorted, and a few additional questions to determine our biggest gaps, I was off and running.
Now I had a gameplan to create a comprehensive strategy, putting the information together in a more consistent manner, understanding exactly how each measure might help to make decisions, and create processes to pull, organize, and report our measures on a regular basis.
It turns out, an audit to determine what we were already doing was exactly what I needed to get started.
If you are struggling to get started with an overall measurement strategy, try starting with a measurement audit. Wrap your arms around what already exists by organizing what you find so you can easily see the gaps and make a gameplan to move forward.
