Getting demonstrable results has long been the “holy grail” for training and development departments. But maybe we should think of it more as our Achilles’ heel. Study after study shows that business leaders doubt (and are often outright skeptical of) the effectiveness of training. When business leaders seek to evaluate investments in training, T&D teams are often unable to provide helpful insight.

An evaluation method we’ve been using recently with our client partners has delivered useful insight. We have found that this method, the Performance Journey Funnel, provides clarity about the outcomes business leaders seek (summative results) while also pointing to how to optimize those outcomes (formative results).

Business Leaders Focus on Business Results Before Investing

Most evaluation frameworks focus first on business results (e.g., Kirkpatrick Level 4). Of course, it goes without saying that investments in training should generate business results. However, our experience shows that, perhaps counterintuitively, business leaders rarely want to evaluate T&D’s impact on business results after the fact. Rather, they want to project those results before they make an investment.

For example, imagine that the head of operations at a rapidly growing manufacturing organization hires a cadre of new line operators only to see her error rates go through the roof. Working with T&D, she explores ways to reduce errors: training every operator on every operation (too expensive!), training every operator on a few key operations (too limited!) and training supervisors on how to coach operators (this is promising!).

Given this analysis by T&D, the operations department decides to move forward on this last idea. Each time quality personnel report an error, a supervisor will coach the operator on how to avoid that error going forward. They know that for this program to work, supervisors will need stronger coaching skills, so they also launch a targeted coaching program.

In short, the head of operations values T&D’s help upfront in analyzing the performance issues, brainstorming solutions and projecting each solution’s business results. She uses the analysis to choose a path forward. But what about evaluating impact after training?

Business Leaders Rarely Want Help Evaluating Business Results

Why do business leaders rarely want T&D to evaluate results after making an investment? For starters, they usually already have the data. Furthermore, T&D often focuses narrowly on the specific contribution of the learning solution. However, business leaders often launch multiple interventions to meet a goal. Each intervention contributes to each other as well as to the business result, and business leaders recognize that it’s often not feasible to portion credit.

For instance, to reduce errors, the head of operations might ask engineering to simplify an error-prone operation and ask recruiting to select candidates who pay better attention to detail and ask T&D to improve coaching. Better attention to detail makes operators easier to coach, while better coaching helps them better focus on the details worth noticing. Why bother teasing it all out? At the end of the quarter, if errors fall within target, the business leaders move on.

Business Leaders Do Want Help Evaluating Behavior Results

When business leaders invest in T&D, they do want to see whether training delivers on its stated promise for its stated cost (Kirkpatrick Level 3). The head of operations “bought” coaching. She would love to know how often supervisors actually coach after errors in the field and how well they do it.

Unfortunately, T&D rarely provides such visibility. More often, we provide a Kirkpatrick Level 2 proxy: Can the audience perform the behaviors in a training environment? Business leaders recognize that there’s many a slip between cup and lip, so they don’t put much faith in such proxies.

When we actually do answer this question, business leaders often return to ask, “How will we make it faster/better/cheaper next year?” T&D teams answer this question even less often.

Insights from Marketing

Let’s look to marketing for some ideas.

For example, let’s say a product manager wants to sign up 500 early adopters. Working with marketing, he might decide to implement a content marketing campaign. Marketing might project that it can generate 500 appointments per week at a cost of $100 per appointment.

So far, this is just like how the head of operations decided to invest in coaching. What happens next differs: Marketing provides clear visibility into both the targeted outcome and the step-by-step process that leads to it.

The key tool that marketing uses is a funnel that tracks the steps through which individuals pass on their journey to the outcome, from seeing a white paper advertised on LinkedIn and clicking through to a landing page to downloading the white paper, receiving a call and making an appointment.

Marketing makes this funnel visible. Two weeks into the campaign, they might report that they finished well under their goal for appointments (50 instead of 500) but also under their goal for cost per appointment ($85 instead of $100). They support that end result with data from the funnel (number of views, clicks, downloads and appointments).

Seeing the funnel helps optimize results. Here, for instance, given the strong conversion rates inside the funnel, marketing would probably focus on generating more initial views.

A Funnel for T&D

To find out whether T&D delivers on our stated promise for our stated cost, we can define our own funnel. A key insight is to recognize that, as Brinkerhoff and Apking point out in their book “High Impact Learning,” for all the fuss we make about getting our moments of training just right, it’s actually the preparation before and reinforcement after training that matter most to outcomes. Looking at our own funnel forces us to look beyond the training event to see how well we address the full journey to performance.

The marketing funnel spotlights the steps toward a sales appointment. Similarly, the Performance Journey Funnel spotlights the steps toward putting a skill to use on the job. We track five steps:

1. I engage: I commit to working on the skill.
2. I prepare: I explore my current capabilities and decide on specific goals.
3. I learn: I execute the skill in a training environment
   (i.e., Kirkpatrick’s Level 2).
4. I practice: I experiment by applying the skill in the field.
5. I perform: I routinely perform the skill on the job.

Using this funnel to track the development of management skills, we’ve been able to report summative results (“72 percent of participants apply the skills on the job”) while uncovering key issues along the way through formative results (“18 percent of participants think they are already strong in the skill” and “24 percent of those who learn fail to practice within a week”).

In T&D, we are used to creating great moments of training, but we often focus less on how participants prepare for and apply training. The Performance Journey Funnel enables us to clarify the behavioral outcomes that business leaders want to evaluate while identifying opportunities to improve. Business leaders can therefore use the Performance Journey Funnel to manage their investments in T&D programs as tightly as they manage investments in marketing.