Predictive Evaluation

Book excerpt: At last, an answer to the question that has bedeviled trainers for decades. Predictive evaluation enables you to effectively and accurately forecast training's value to your company, measure against these predictions, establish indicators to track your progress, make midcourse corrections, and report the results in a language that business executives respond to and understand. Dave Basarab explains how to begin by identifying the specific goals and beliefs you want to instill in participants. The next step is to determine exactly what these will look like when put into action. Finally you develop quantifiable measures of how employees' adopting the target beliefs and goals will impact the business. A key strength of this process is that it is profoundly collaborative—supervisors and employees work together to establish standards for success each step of the way. A how-to guide filled with worksheets, examples, and other tools, Predictive Evaluation ensures that, rather than being regarded as an expense and an act of faith, training will be seen as an investment with a concrete payoff.