Centre for Learning Impact Blog

The Centre for Workplace Skills is leading a national knowledge-gathering project designed to help small to medium sized organizations (SME) improve the quality of their training programs and enhance their impact on job performance and productivity.

As part of this project, we are seeking input from experts, business leaders, and other key stakeholders to help us identify the most effective organizational training needs assessment tools, resources, models and practices currently in use.

The Centre for Workplace Skills (CWS) is an independent, national organization led by the Canadian Manufacturers & Exports (CME) and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and funded by the Government of Canada’s Sector Council Program. The research program is being conducted by the Centre for Learning Impact.

If you or someone you know are using, or are aware of, exemplary training needs assessment practices or tools, we would be very grateful if you could take a few moments to share such practices with this knowledge gathering initiative. To share your Needs Assessment best practices approach, or model, click here.

In spite of the seemingly obvious importance of alignment, the single most difficult exercise of each Investing in People^® analysis was working with the organizations to identify the key business measures that the training was intended to impact. Surprisingly, it was not only training personnel who had difficulty identifying relevant business drivers (the monetary outcomes that the training should ideally impact). Even senior executives and financial officers were equally unsure about which business measures the training had been designed to improve. Surprisingly, senior decision makers were frequently even uncertain about which measures the training ideally should impact. This observation uncomfortably resurrects the business maxim: “If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?”

How does your organization address this issue? Are you aware of successful strategies to ensure training is aligned to the bottom line?