The Kirkpatrick Model- Is Corporate Training Helping You To Be Better At Your Job?
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How often have you been in a corporate training session that truly changed your way of working? That impacts you to this day and makes doing your job (or at least part of it) easier, faster, better or more efficient? Probably not as often as you would like. And definitely not as often as your company would like. Looking at the amount of money spent on corporate training, that is not how it should be. That is why the Kirkpatrick Model was invented.
Before discussing how companies can offer more impactful trainings to their employees, let us first explore a framework introduced by Donald Kirkpatrick in 1959. The Kirkpatrick Model is one of the most commonly used methods to assess training effectiveness.The Kirkpatrick Model describes four levels of learning effectiveness:Reaction — The way employees react to the training they receive. It reflects the participants view on topic, instructor, material, venue, etc. This is commonly measured through a survey or questionnaire, with questions like “How would you rate this training?” and “How valuable was the content presented?”Learning — The knowledge employees gathered during the training session. This is most commonly measured through quizzes, both before and after the session. Interviewing participants, before and after, might be an alternative.Behavior — The extent to which employees apply learning content in their day-to-day activities. Impact is typically measured over weeks or months. Measuring is generally more difficult and requires e.g. in-field inspections, evaluations from participants’ managers or well-crafted self-assessments.Results — The impact of changed behaviors on actual business outcomes. Both defining which business metrics should improve as a result of a specific training and measuring the factual results are challenging. Examples of business outcomes are: increased retention, increased sales, higher quality ratings and increased customer satisfaction.These four levels of learning effectiveness are relevant both in measuring and designing trainings. In designing a training you should start defining a desired outcome on the Results level and work your way back to the Reaction level.When measuring the effectiveness of learning you start by measuring the Reaction level and work your way up towards Results level. This is also what you see chronologically: immediately after the training you measure the Reaction level, and then, after weeks or even months, you measure the Behavior and Results levels.Circling back to the question we posed at the start of this blog, we can now rephrase it to: “How often have you been in a training session that incorporated level 3 and 4 of the Kirkpatrick model?”. Around us we see a lot of companies struggling with going beyond the first two levels. And that’s not surprising, level 3 and 4 are hard to master.Lepaya, the new corporate learning platform, is helping companies to reach at least level 3, and push for level 4 wherever possible. Designed with a smart mix of modern day technology and a solid educational background, the Lepaya platform transforms corporate learning into integrated and extended learning journeys. These journeys are crafted to increase learning effectiveness by creating insight in how employees actually behave and changing that behavior in a fun and engaging way.With the help of new innovative learning platforms, like Lepaya, more and more employees will answer our initial question positively and say: “Yes, actually, very often training sessions help me to be better at my work.”Questions, comments or suggestions? Visit lepaya.com, comment below, or email us at info@lepaya.com.
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You don't need to be a perfect leader, but you need to be open enough to admit that there is an issue.You talk about the 'persona trap', what is that?You're stuck in a persona where you perform in a certain way within your company. You have a role, a position, a reputation, and that locks you into specific behaviors. The worse the match between who you are as a person and how you need to show up in your organization, the more inner conflict that’s created. Especially at the top, it’s a problem for many executives. They're supposed to be the people who know it all and be decisive. While if you're honest, you don't necessarily know everything, you’re uncertain and have anxieties.The inner core of the honesty gap is breaking the performance, breaking the acting you feel you must do. If you've put yourself in a role of being the strong, decisive, number-oriented leader, that's how you have to behave. 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