Tool 7 – Improving Impact

The seventh tool in the series is to help you continually improve the impact of your learning solutions.

Driving better business value through learning requires ongoing engagement with others, particularly managers, to create shared ownership of solutions. This starts with smarter up-front conversations with people requesting support with courses and content (the Needs Analysis tool). It also involves continuing that conversation in order to maintain and track momentum.

That’s where this tool comes in.

Revisit principle: work on what matters

Did you know that whilst we are more likely to be proactive in identifying a performance issue before recommending a solution than in previous years, only 55% of L&D have a process in place for tracking learning transfer and 46% have a process in place for supporting learning transfer [1]. If the performance issue matters to business then we need to become better at ensuring our interventions hit the mark. That means becoming smarter at working with line managers because the learning transfer magic happens back in the workplace.

Getting started

This tool has been created as a simple conversation guide to help you improve the type of conversations you have with managers and the timings of those conversations:

before implementing an intervention

during the intervention to review progress and participant support

after the intervention to explore participant support, outcomes, and identify improvements for the future.

A tool to help!

Use the improving impact tool when you need to

• engage managers to share responsibility to ensure that solutions create impact
• make intelligent choices about what, when and how to evaluate
• continuously improve a learning solution
• demonstrate the impact you have created together

* The Improving Impact Tool was created by Michelle Ockers as part of the Emerging Stronger toolkit to help L&D professionals thrive in the ever changing world of work. It was initially published in conjunction with our publishing partner Go1.