Chief Learning Officer - December 2007 - (Page 45) ality, it typically falls to about twothirds. It can be higher if you emphasize the importance of the evaluation in the class by handing out a notice with course objectives that explains when, where, how and why the evaluation is necessary. Reminder messages also are a nice way to keep rates high. Additionally, giving away an iPod once a month is just enough incentive to get people to fill them out. In the end, electronic data collection not only saves tons of administrative time and cost, but also yields better comments and more objective data. Finally, customization is a challenge. I’ve been in rooms where the learning subsets argued over a fivepoint or seven-point scale, or whether they’ll refer to the teacher of a course as a facilitator or instructor on the form. The key is to reach a consensus with a standard set of questions. Smart survey tools can account for tweaks in verbiage or scale and still maintain data aggregation and consistency. Further, these tools can do conditional or course-specific questions to provide some flexibility. Try this: Ask the entire team to just use a standard smart sheet for three months, then come back with changes they wanted before. In my experience, nobody comes back with changes 75 percent or more of the time. So, be flexible but firm in revisions. A TRAINING INVESTMENT YOU CAN MEASURE. The Strayer University Educational Alliance program. Let Strayer University help you develop and train your company’s most important asset: your employees. We will evaluate your internal e-learning and training programs in conjunction with employee work experience to issue comparable college credits to advance – not repeat – existing business knowledge. In addition, we can customize our educational programs so your employees learn the skills needed to create immediate results specific to your needs. We also provide online reports and central billing system so you can better measure the return on your training investment. Strayer University is a regionally accredited, nationally recognized university with a history of educating working adults for more than 115 years. Because of our expertise in helping full-time employees fit education into their lives, Strayer University’s Educational Alliance team understands how best to help businesses position continuing education as a part of the corporate workforce development initiative. Conclusion Surveys make great leadership tools if done right and on a regular basis with the right tools to collect and analyze the data. They are excellent sources of business intelligence for the resource-strapped organization and help make data-driven decisions. They’re not perfect, but neither is anything in business. Jeffrey Berk is chief operating officer for KnowledgeAdvisors, a human capital analytics solutions and technology firm. Berk is also an adjunct professor of management at Loyola University’s M.B.A. program, where he teaches a graduate school course on performance improvement. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. To learn more about Strayer University’s educated approach to workforce development, call 703.339.3000 or email BizDev@strayer.edu. http://www.strayer.edu
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