Measurement and Evaluation: Why Bother?
By David Vance at Chief Learning Officer
This blog post reminds us of insights that have informed our Advantage WaySM approach from its inception. Vance posits that you must “run learning like a business” – and you can’t do it without a measurement and evaluation strategy. As our work with clients has shown over many years, measurement is absolutely necessary if you expect to do 3 crucial things:
- find out if learning is really making a difference
- improve your ability to manage toward learning goals –and–
- support continuous learning strategy improvement
Leaving a session on measurement and evaluation at a recent conference, I overheard heard two participants talking. It went like this: “We don’t need to do any of this measurement and evaluation stuff. It’s a waste of time.” The second one agreed: “Everyone loves what we are doing. We don’t need to prove anything to anybody.”
Although I have heard this before, it still surprises me. We can have a good discussion about what types of measurement are appropriate and how much we should invest, but are we really still discussing whether to do measurement at all? I guess so, at least in some cases. And even where there is agreement to do measurement, there is often no formal evaluation strategy.
So, let’s talk about why we should bother with measurement and evaluation, especially when others seem satisfied with what we are already doing. In my opinion, there are three powerful arguments for measurement. …
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