|
Determining the Effectiveness of Training
A company in the Healthcare industry decided to use Diagnostic Assessment to a) produce a comprehensive training programme for its project professionals but also b) to determine the effectiveness of the training after six months.
HR prepared a paper for the line managers' approval to spell out the nature of the exercise and some 150 people were enrolled on the programme.
One of the most important aspects that needed to be stressed was that the output from PCA would be collated by job level and the training determined, in priority sequence, for each of the categories involved.
For example, in the case of the Project Team Leaders, it transpired that there was a total of eight categories broken down as follows:
 |
Project control
|
|
Risk management
|
|
Change control
|
|
Estimating
|
|
Requirements management
|
|
Procurement
|
|
Communication
|
|
Conflict management
|
The courses were prepared by an external agency and all participants were told that they would be re-assessed six months later to see the extent to which the trained knowledge had been retained. An interesting condition developed; all the course participants began to think of a six-month training course, rather than a three-day event and 'let's get back to the real world'.
When it became time to re-assess, PCA was used again and of the 150 total participants, 144 obtained higher grades than at the first assessment six months previously. The difference was that because they knew they would sit PCA again, they tried to ensure that all that they had learnt had been productively used.
One very important point, the PCA questions were re-sequenced in order to 'scramble' any ideas of remembering from the last time.
Back to Case Histories menu
|
