(22a) Ensuring Learning (Not Just Training) - Measuring the Impact of Learning on Business Performance

“How do we know our training is working” is a common question most organizations ask frequently and many times it is asked around budget cycles. Training has often been used as a tool to drive compliance, whether regulatory or organizational; however, many organizations continue to fall short of their performance measures, specifically their safety and operational risk management.

For the past 4-5 years, we have been developing a powerful learning model/system that does the following:

• Standardize learning tools, while allowing for site/individual/organizational flexibility

• Capture millions of data points from all aspects of the learning process, formerly never captured by most organizations

• Pinpoints exactly where improvement is needed to achieve the desired organizational goals

We’ve worked with many mature organizations that have top-quartile processes and systems in place, yet seeing leading indicators of performance continue to drop. After further analysis, we found great standards, policies, procedures, adult-focused learning approaches, worker assessments that were great, BUT incidents were still occurring around certain factors (maintenance & reliability, safety, downtime, etc.).

Through our Learning Model and Analysis, we were able to determine there were breakdowns in the following areas and began to immediately mitigate:

• “How” the message was being delivered to workers conveyed lack of belief in the standard

• Supervisors/Managers did not reinforce the policies through their actions, not words

• Worker assessments were not validated in the field, post workshop

• The learning environment was not appropriate for the desired objective.

• Engaged operations in the solution to ensure the upgrade was applicable and owned by the field

Overall, knowing where to target improvements is one of the most difficult tasks, along with the ability to quantify the impact learning has on organizational performance are what makes this Learning Effectiveness Model so innovative