Data: Telling Stories with Numbers

May 22, 2019 | by Johanna Mickel

Over on the PM College blog today, Crystal Busch and I were dissecting a presentation on learning trends by Elliott Masie when one topic hit a nerve. Most learning organizations, Masie said, don't know how to use the data they collect. Okay, I agree. But I'll take it a step farther: they don't know what data to collect, because they have never asked themselves this question:

"What would I need to know in order to determine what, if any, business impacts our training is responsible for?"

We know this because at PM College, we've done several internal research projects to find out what kinds of metrics our clients are collecting and how they use them. From giant multinationals to small boutique firms, the training function seems to be stalled at the level of counting heads and asking for participant feedback. Masie was on to something when he noted that we need to measure if learners did learn and as a result are they doing their jobs better or faster. But in my view, he did not go nearly far enough. The old cycle, where you came back a year later to ask if someone's work performance has improved, is too long: many people aren’t even with the company after a year. Just asking, as he suggests, whether  people who are trained perform better than those not trained isn't enough, either, although it makes a useful baseline.

The question is, for T&D professionals who really want to claim a place at the strategic level of the company, What does "better" mean? Does it mean that you can demonstrate that a week of project management training has had a measureable impact on budget performance, and if so, by how much, and how does that impact the bottom line? That's where training data collection and performance measurement needs to go. It can be done ... we've done it ... but here's a telling fact: we've proposed presenting our method at the ATD conference more than once, and not been selected!

This is just one way that T&D is shortsighted from a business perspective. Masie touched on another issue when he said that we need to "stop using ‘learning words’ and speak more in business terms (retention, speed, revenues, etc.). This has also been an important change for project managers. We are all in business so let's train for the business, measure for the business and speak to the business goals. Why else are we here?

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