“Oh No, Not Another Assessment!”
Training Application Assessments That Work

By Lori Lindbergh, Ph.D., PMP, Researcher and Psychometrician, LORIUS

Unfortunately, workplace assessments have gotten a bad rap. You’ve most likely been assessed to death and have participated in a number of assessments that didn’t result in much action or create the changes promised. Training application assessments (e.g., Kirkpatrick’s Level 3 Assessments) are no exception. Often, organizations decide to conduct this type of assessment as an afterthought, long after the training program has been implemented; or they decide to conduct an ad hoc assessment in reaction to persistent, unsatisfactory project performance. However, using training application assessments in these ways may limit the value provided by the results if the assessments are not conducted properly. If reactive training application assessments seem to be the norm, how can you ensure your assessments provide valuable information for performance improvement?

This is the first in a series of four articles designed to help you get the most out of training application assessments, regardless of when and how you use them, and ensure strong stakeholder support and participation. It’s not that assessments are a bad idea; it’s more about correctly identifying the purpose of the assessment, gathering stakeholder support and participation and establishing realistic expectations about how the findings should be interpreted in your workplace.

Apply these five principles to ensure you get maximum value from your training assessments.

1. Align Purpose With Situation
In the ideal world, organizations would build training application assessments into the design of their training programs and conduct pre-training assessments to establish a skills baseline for post-training comparison. However, this typically doesn’t occur. Without a pre-training skills application baseline, it’s not really possible to evaluate the behavioral change that resulted from training attendance. With this in mind, when setting up an assessment, you must examine your current situation and decide what purpose the assessment can serve. Without a baseline assessment, the most an ad hoc training application assessment can provide is a current snapshot of the key components that encourage and sustain behavioral change.

Participants in successful, targeted training programs:

        • Know what to do and are doing it;
        • Have a desire to change;
        • Work in a supportive environment; and
        • Are rewarded to change.

Training programs accomplish the first two by providing the necessary knowledge and skills and by creating a positive attitude toward the desired change. The third component refers to the supportive environment created by the employee’s supervisor and overall organization, and the fourth component refers to the internal and external rewards an employee receives from changing his or her behavior.

2. Context is Key
Employees apply their skills learned in training within the context of the organization to achieve some level of improvement in performance and  project outcomes. Training application assessments are not meant to measure return on investment or improvement in business outcomes; however, without some relevant, high-level measure of performance outcomes, when presented with the findings, you may be left saying, “So what?” To avoid this reaction, training application assessment findings must be evaluated relative to how the work is performed in your organization and validated against some measure of the outcomes being achieved on projects so you can answer the question, “What application level is appropriate in my organization? 75%? 90%? 100%?”

Available benchmarks can help, but may not reflect the differences in the supportiveness of organizational environments that impact skills application. The benefits of training will be limited by unsupportive management, lack of project accountability, inconsistent project goals, lack of opportunities to apply skills, extreme workloads, ineffective tools and processes and by reward systems that don’t encourage and support desired behavioral changes. 

3. All Assessments Are Created Equal
All assessments need to exhibit evidence of reliability and validity. You need to be sure you are consistently measuring what you are supposed to be measuring and that the results reflect what is happening in your workplace. Simply compiling a set of questions using training objectives or best practices does not necessarily guarantee both conditions are met.

Reliability indicates the assessment questions and associated rating scales consistently differentiate participants with higher levels of skills application from those with lower levels. Validity indicates there is strong evidence to support the use of the assessment results in the workplace (i.e., the results reflect the skills application level in the organization.) Assessment questionnaires should be tested prior to using them and/or have a testing component built into the assessment process.

4. Achieve Active Support and Communications
Assessment preparation, planning and support as well as regular communications will improve the success of your assessment project and help identify the obstacles and challenges that could diminish the value of the assessment results (e.g., low participation rates, apathy, participant confidentiality/anonymity and ambiguous/irrelevant questions). Following assessment development and delivery best practices is important; however, planning your actions to achieve active, continuous executive support and to encourage and motivate participants is also critical.

5. Establish WIIFE – What’s In It For Everyone
High participation and stakeholder support are essential. Assessments must be perceived by all stakeholders as providing value and a means to achieve their desired outcomes such as the following:

• Executives want business results;
• Human Resources/Learning and Development Professionals want to provide valuable learning opportunities to improve employee competence,;
• Organizational Development Professionals want to develop a supportive organizational environment to improve employee effectiveness; and
• Employees want relevant training and development opportunities to help them achieve success in their organization.

When you keep these five principles in mind, your assessments can provide extraordinary results to help all stakeholders achieve their desired outcomes. These five principles will provide the framework for the remaining articles in this series. The next article will focus on how to achieve senior executive support for your training application assessments and ensure the assessment findings offer valuable information to help executives provide the support employees need to successfully apply the skills learned in training.

Lori Lindbergh, Ph.D. is the Principal at LORIUS, an organization that offers a unique approach to surveys, assessments and applied research to help organizations, leaders and managers, consultants and business professionals transform data into actionable business intelligence to drive improvement, professional development and performance outcomes. For more information: www.loriusllc.com .