Letters

BUSINESS RESULTS STILL ELUSIVE

I appreciate Peter Bregman and Howie Jacobson's article, "Yes, You Can Measure the Business Results of Training," in the August issue of TRAINING. They pick up on the theme that Robert Brinkerhoff and I discussed in our book The Learning Alliance (Jossey-Bass,1994), and they focus additional light on the importance of measuring internal and external customer satisfaction when evaluating training programs. However, I have concerns about several of the points the authors make.

Their argument that customer satisfaction surveys are "easy and inexpensive to create, administer, tabulate and interpret" is misleading. Producing valid and reliable data from customer surveys is no simple matter. Survey design is an art and a science. It requires considerable expertise to ensure that your questions ask what you really want to know, that all customers will understand the questions in the same way every time they fill out the form, that the layout and flow of the items makes it simple for customers, and that the data is easy to interpret and use by stakeholders within the organization. I would caution readers to involve people who have this expertise when doing these kinds of studies. In the long run, doing surveys right is much cheaper than doing inexpensive surveys that produce worthless data.

Also, the authors say that "focusing on discrete results," such as trying to measure the RoI of training, is problematic. They write, " ... organizations are complex systems, and the markets in which they operate are more complex still:' Therefore, they argue, trainers should measure customer satisfaction instead. But the same argument can be made about customer satisfaction: Training is only one of many...