I have a different take on this subject and in a series of blogs I hope to explore my ideas, encourage your comments and if you are willing engage you in some research that may provide some helpful insight.
Here's my hypothesis, that all education always delivers a valuable return.
I think L&D people have stopped trusting in this phenomena and are actually trying too hard to measure the wrong things as indicators of learning success.
Take for example this simple observation from data collected over the past 200 years.
It shows primary and secondary school enrollment rates alongside birth and death rates. Given that the population has grown massively over the same period, this is a very compelling set of figures. It might be easy to challenge the correlation between these sets of figures, surely there are many contributing factors for these improvements in society? Science and medicine has made huge advances, society has progressed, laws have stabilised communities, our understanding of so many things has advanced, technology has transformed our lives. Yet every one of these factors are reliant upon people who are able to access these complex worlds and use their ability to progress their own sphere of expertise. Where does this capability begin? It must begin with increasing numbers of educated people. This is two hundred years of evidence that education delivers a valuable return.
Here's another insight from a very recent study looking at the impact of education in 2012.
This one looks at the level of unemployment and the average monthly salary of people groups with differing levels of education.
The story is compelling and not unsurprising. When people drop out of learning early they reduce their potential to be employed and their ability to bring home income. It is telling to see that that these indicators improve so clearly as the individual sticks with education and so develop their potential. This is current evidence that education delivers a valuable return.
Wherever you look it's not hard to find confirmation that education delivers benefits.
I'm a big fan of real blended learning, the 70:20:10 concept makes sense to me and as L&D people we need to set up all kinds of learning opportunities within our organisations. What we don't need to do is support the belief which suggests we measure learning outcomes by evaluating the change in the learner. Focusing on the nitty gritty behavioural level misses the point that all learning delivers a valuable return. The way to measure this needs to be aligned with the performance indicators of the organisation, not trying to capture the intricacies of the small individual changes.
Having some data to support this view would be very helpful for all of us L&D folk. So here’s what we are doing...
If we are able to collect a sample of c.500 L&D budgets alongside the indicators of organisational success we may be able to observe whether an increase in L&D spending correlates with improved performance results. Perhaps not too many organisations have seen improved results over recent years, so we need to look at organisations within sector to understand how the relative success compares.
Measures of success are easy to identify within the private and charitable sectors, but we need your help to determine what to measure in public sector organisations.
If you are at all interested in the question of L&D return on investment, please complete our survey and if possible pass a link to this blog page onto other L&D professionals that you know. Current results will be displayed on completion of the survey, and our full report on findings will be sent to everyone who takes part. If you are working in the public sector, then please use our survey to suggest the right indicators of performance.
Your thoughts on any of the above would be very welcome.
Regards
Bob
No comments:
Post a Comment