Category: Training Goals
Recently I had a series of questions from one of my
Predictive Evaluation
(PE) students who was reading my
book
and preparing to start her
Predictive Evaluation Certification
. It is a conversation that gets to the heart of PE – defining what successful training is and then what to do with it. These questions are from Sue – I know she will soon be an outstanding evaluator using PE. Enjoy.
QUESTION: If the participants do not meet the percentage of acceptable goals upon completion of the course, does that mean that the goals they have written do not meet the required standard AND if not isn’t it too late to correct this once the participants have left the class?
Last week I was talking to Kathi from Wisconsin who has been employing my
Predictive Evaluation approach
. We were discussing about predicting
Intention Goals
for her technical courses. Intentions goals are the plans participants wish to achieve using the knowledge and skills they learned in. This is the first evaluation focus point, because there is little or no adoption or business impact if participants have little or no intent to use the training. Intention Evaluation involves predicting what successful goals should be and judging participant-authored goals against the prediction. If participant goals meet the success gate, those goals are labeled as acceptable. Goals that do not meet the standard are labeled as unacceptable.
Training Evaluation work processes need to be integrated with the following existing training and development processes:
- Instructional Design
- Course Development
- Course Delivery
Action Mapping
takes action planning further – it is modeled upon the principles of force field analysis. The participant authors their goal (plan of action back on the job). They then identify the barriers and enablers to goal accomplishment. Finally they create actions to deal with the barriers and just as important use enablers for goal accomplishment.
Here is a sample of an action map (see below) that I use with selected leadership programs. The process I have participants follow is:
Show expected Adoptive Behavior before, during, and after content & practice.
Left to their own devices, participants will form judgments on how to implement learned skills which may be different than what we are hoping for. Simply tell them what the adoptive behaviors the company wants are – do this early and often. Not just what they will learn, but what they can do with it.
This simple practice has a remarkable success rate.
Anyone ever do something like this? What were the results?
A few weeks ago I was presenting Predictive Evaluation at ISPI’s annual Performance Improvement Conference. During my session we were talking about establishing the Success Gate for Intention Goals. Thought this would be a great topic for a blog – so here you go.
An Intention Goals Success Gate is the percentage of goals written by participants that are judged as matching the goals created when you predicted training’s values. For example, if an Intention Goals Success Gate is set at 90% and 50 goals are authored by participants, then the 90% success gate requires 45 of those goals be judged as acceptable (as matching the predicted Intention Goals).
Establishing an Intention Goals Success Gate is not difficult. Sometimes you, the evaluator, will nominate a percentage based on experience with the type of training being delivered. In other cases it is set by the program sponsors or the Steering Committee. I usually recommend that the success gate be set high, such as 90%. Steering Committees ask, why so high? My rationale is right goals lead to an increased adoption level and I want to maximize training’s adoption thus resulting in maximum value gained. Another way to think about it is to consider training to be a factory producing highly skilled workers. What defect rate does the company expect from it real factories? The answer is as close to zero as possible. We know that we are dealing with people and not widgets but concept is the same. I want as many participants planning to do the right thing as possible. Taking that into mind, the most common Intention Goal Success Gate is 90%.
Comments?
Yesterday I received a tweet asking me “What does a good participant goal for Predictive Evaluation look like?” Great question.
A good goal should answer two questions:
- In what work situations do we want participants to apply the learned content?
- In those situations, what observable actions (work) will they do?
Training learning objectives and course materail assist in answering these questions. For example, in a Business Acumen course the learning objective was: “Attain and enhance Voice of Customer (VOC) – convert customer knowledge into game changing ideas.”
The course taught this objective by… “ In Pursuit of Legendary Customer Experiences – This module focused on building a framework for customer intimacy to leverage the firm’s existing customer base as well as attract and retain the right customers. Participants learned specific voice of the customer (VOC) methods applicable to the company then focused on converting deep customer insight from VOC into actions that create legendary customer experiences.”
An Intention Evaluation addresses the following question: Are participant goals and beliefs upon course completion aligned with desired goals? This means that you incorporate goal planning into the course and have participants write their own goals. A way to do this is to provide the goal planning sheet in the Participant Notes and provide notes for the Facilitator, explaining the purpose of the activity, how to introduce it, how much time to allocate, and criteria for acceptable action items. Make sure that you allocate time at the end of the program to write goals. As a rule of thumb, participants need 15-30 minutes to write two goals. In some cases more time is required than this. Participants who are technical workers rather than knowledge workers may take longer. They may experience difficulty articulating on paper what they want to write and need the facilitator to help them.
What constitutes a good goal? A correctly written goal meets the three criteria of what I call the SOS+D model: