There are many times where we as evaluators, trainers, and HR professionals need to convey training evaluation findings. Often we spend hours authoring a detailed report making sure every word is just so. In fact the only people who read these reports are us. Our business partners don’t have the time or the desire to read an 18-page report with an appendix and glossary of terms.
In my Predictive Evaluation model we share our findings using the dashboard concept. The dashboard is a report to senior management that provides an at-a-glance perspective on the current status of a course in the context of predetermined metrics for that program (Intention, Adoption, or Impact). Good dashboards are simple, short, and do not require you to interpret them.
Dashboard reports are used to allow managers and executives to examine and assess training success. They facilitate discussion by highlighting metric status points, encouraging management by exception, where deviations from the norm become the focal points of discussion. Those evaluation metrics should be established early in course design and applied as the course is delivered and transfer followed by organizational impact happens.
As the name implies, the dashboard report often takes on the look and feel of an instrument panel in a car or plane. It is a set of graphic representations of the evaluation information important to management. I suggest using a three-page PowerPoint deck that usually contains the following:
- Page 1 – the charts and graphs that provide, at a glance, the evaluation results. This is the “instrument panel” of the dashboard.
- Page 2 – examples from students that supply what happened to generate the results on page 1. Where the first page is “instrument panel” of the dashboard, this section is the “heart and soul” of the evaluation data describing what employees are doing with the new skills and knowledge.
- Page 3 – evaluator comments. This section allows us to provide our interpretation of the data and any other circumstances such as organizational factors that have influenced the result.
Perhaps the greatest danger associated with dashboard reports is that management may believe they understand the intricacies of the course by virtue of this limited amount of information. They sometimes must be reminded that reading a dashboard report no more makes one aware of the details of a course than reading the indicators on a car’s dashboard makes one a mechanic. It’s a quick, effective overview of critical metrics.
Examples of Predictive Evaluation dashboards can be found at PE Dashboards.