STAGE 3 - Balanced Scorecard for Skills

APPLICATION - My Balanced Scorecard

Things to Remember About Evaluating Your Workplace Education Efforts

• To properly validate the effectiveness of your workplace education efforts and to demonstrate the role that these efforts play in helping to achieve Balanced Scorecard targets, the evaluation of workplace education must, necessarily, go beyond Kirkpatrick's Level 1 "Response" evaluation. You must reach the higher levels of evaluation (i.e. Level 2 - Demonstration of Learning, Level 3 - Demonstrated Effect on Job Performance, Level 4 - Demonstrated Effect on Organizational Performance Results). You may wish to review the principles of evaluation in Stage 1 again in thinking about your evaluation plan.

• In filling in this worksheet, you have only completed the first part (the planning) of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. You still must do the evaluations (measure the effectiveness of your workplace education programs), check what you learned from the evaluations and determine what else you need to know, and act on what you have learned from your evaluation to reassess and make adjustments and improvements to this process.

• Even if your organization does not adopt a formal Balanced Scorecard approach to its strategic planning, you can still use the Balanced Scorecard framework as a guide if you are responsible for designing, implementing and evaluating workplace education efforts. By keeping abreast of what is important to your organization, knowing what typically gets measured and reported, and asking key people in your organization about overall organizational objectives along the four Balanced Scorecard categories, you can ensure that workplace educational programs will be more closely aligned to your organization's goals. And by being more thorough and vigilant in evaluating workplace education, you will be better able to illustrate the organizational effectiveness of these efforts.