Businesses must assess the quality of learning

Have a beer

fivepack

You may have heard my story about the brewer who was told to cut his costs 16%. “Not a problem,” he told his CFO. “We’ll simply put five bottles in each six-pack instead of six.”

The CFO protested that people would notice. Why not just cut the training budget?

“And they won’t notice if we stop investing in the know-how of our people???

The 2 1/2 minute video recap on YouTube

Outcomes matter

Odd as it seems, budget decisions about corporate learning rarely take the quality of the outcomes into account. Bean counters treat learning as if it were binary, present or not, when in fact learning outcomes are highly variable.

You know in your gut that some learning experiences are exhilarating; they impart lessons that will be with you for decades; they’re challenging but fun. You also know that some learning is deadly dull, mindless, in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, and eminently worthless.

On the organization’s income statement, however, the good, the bad, and the ugly learning experiences all look the same: they are costs. The benefits of the learning are not entered into the ledger. If you follow generally accepted accounting principles instead of common sense, you’ll always select the low-ball solution. The consequences can be scary, like astronauts contemplating the fact that their spacecraft was contracted out to the lowest bidder.

cutcosts

Benefit analysis

Take a new training initiative, for example, a new product rollout. Picture the training in your mind’s eye. Got it?

Okay, now think about how you could improve the learning taking place. You could post videos of a few winning sales pitches. Create a space online for asking questions and sharing advice. Perhaps add a 24-hour help desk or product hot-line for answering questions. Capture and share customer testimonials. You can easily come up with another dozen ways to improve learning outcomes. But when do you stop? How much is enough?

The hand-wringing discussions about the ROI of learning rarely lay out the range of R’s you can achieve with different levels of I. This is naive. We need a new calculus for evaluating investments in learning. We should be optimizing our cost:benefit ratios, and this entails getting specific about the benefits received from different levels of costs.