Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 6th Edition by Raymond Noe, John Hollenbeck, Barry Gerhart,Patrick Wright

Exercise 13

Training Executives Are Unimpressed with Their Measurement Processes
In a recent survey of more than 200 chief learning officers, roughly three-quarters of them reported a need to improve their company's measurement of training effectiveness. Worse, the numbers have been heading in the wrong direction. In four years of asking this question, the researchers have seen the share of executives who are satisfied with measurement decline, while the dissatisfied share has been rising.
One source of dissatisfaction may be that the most common measurements used at respondents' companies are not directly tied to business success. Most companies measure the amount of training they do: number of courses, number of students, hours of training. A majority of companies also ask participants if they are satisfied with training they participated in. Less than half ask about employee performance or impact of the training on the company's business results.
In this context, training professionals can give their company an edge by linking training programs to business strategy. Ideally, whenever considering a training program, they would start by determining how the company's performance should change as a result of the employees learning new information or skills. They would establish training content to make that performance improvement possible, and they would measure whether the desired results indeed have followed the training program.
Suppose you are a training leader at a manufacturing company, and you have been asked to deliver a report about the value of your department's work. You report the number of training hours provided by your staff and the number of employees trained. How do you think the company's business managers would react to this report