Now we're talking performance

I should have known better. I should have thought about the responses I would get when I wrote my previous articles on ROI. All good stuff and very much appreciated. Like I said in the first article, if ROI is what your organization wants from you then by all means use it.

My only ask is to be certain that your organization wants it because far too often, in my experience, it is someone outside your organization "selling" you on the use of ROI because it benefits them in some way.

Which leads me to a private conversation I had with one of the ROI advocates who was adamant that you should provide the ROI of learning to prove your value.

So I asked her "in your career learning journey, is there an instance that you can think of where what you learned in a course or workshop, skills/knowledge learning, completely prepared you for the job?"

A little more back and forth conversation and she eventually agreed that every job is a continuous journey of learning skills, developing capability and achieving competency.

"Now we're talking about performance" I said. "What if I told you that learning leads to performance improvement, but performance improvement can happen without learning."

But for human performance improvement, it's a continuous journey of learning, applying, reflecting, achieving and the cycle repeats. So when people talk about measuring "learning" ROI, at what stage of the journey are they measuring? After initial skills training? Is this before the employees return to work or after?

Is it during capability development? Is it after competency achievement? At this point you may be asking what I'm talking about. Revisiting my earlier conversation with the ROIer, we agreed achieving optimal performance was a journey and for every new skill you learn, you have to apply to develop your capability and through experience eventually reach competency.

And on that journey, there are countless other mini-cycles of the same big journey; if we are growing, we are learning.

Why not be a part of the entire learning journey and tell that quantitative and qualitative story. Seriously, would you rather tell the learning measurement story at the end of training, or would you rather show you had a part in all things that led to performance improvement? Show your value, don't defend it!

I wonder how many vendors will reach out to me this time to tell me how they can improve learning ROI? Probably the same number of times I'll say AND?

Thanks for reading, until next time...