I recently completed writing a booklet entitled POSITIONING AND MEASURING LEARNING IN AN ORGANIZATION.
I found the experience of writing the piece to be extremely rewarding, intesting and also frustraing! There appears to be a shift in the market - not so much from TRAINING to LEARNING but from TRAINING to MEASUREMENT. And here rests the problem - most meassurement standards for training are focussed on the return on investment of training in an organization. And to be honest this is almost impossible to measure beyond the student assessment at the time of training - beyond that there is no effect monitoring of the change in behaviour or performance improvement of the student (Learning should bring a change in behavior, that is, a change in the way an activity is undertaken). With the focus on ROI only there is not much hope of focussing on the bigger picture - has the company changed! I believe that people achieve business goals and not the plans themselves. Therefore the business goals and targets should be the focus of training or learning. If the talent pool knows what is required, and are supported in achieving the goals then everyone benefits. I call this focus "return on strategy" that is, measuring the return on the achievement of the goals and targets. training and learning must be focused on assisting staff in improving their knowledge and skills on those items that bring an impact to the business goals. If we can perform a "before" and "after" measurement on just a few key business attributes then we can measure return on strategy and the impact of change on the business.I put forward an approach to measuring the impact of learning .

I would appreciate any feedback or comments on the topic of measuring the impact of learning in a business - and how learning becomes the linkage between goals and targets and the talent pool.
Thanks,
Stan Daneman, Toronto