Evaluation Debate in People Management

Bill Parsons, CIPD Vice-President, raised an important debate in the most recent issue of People Management (27 March). Under the heading ‘Learning to Leap’, Bill observed that learning and development often fails to correlate with business metrics and contribute to business outcomes.

Unfortunately, the debate hasn’t really taken off. As I write, mine is the only comment (5 April) in reply to Bill’s piece. Keith Ledingham has just written a letter in response, ‘ROI is essential to measure HR’s contribution’ (17 April).

The problem is, the only people who seem interested in debating this are from the supply side: Keith is one example; my recent articles on evaluation at TrainingZone have attracted comments only from Paul Kearns and Stephen Gill, both consultants, despite thousands of “reads”; the overwhelming majority of followers of my evaluation account on Twitter are from the supply side.

It seems far too many HR and L&D professionals are ignoring learning evaluation. My next blog post will explore why this is.