Telling Training's Story: Evaluation Made Simple, Credible, and Effective

By Robert Brinkerhoff

You know it in your gut—training and development is valuable and worthwhile. But as a trainer, you need to prove this fact over and over to clients focused on bottom-line results. While most training evaluation methods are too elaborate, too complex, too costly, too difficult to explain, or worse, produce data that nobody believes, Telling Training's Story offers a simple, compelling way of evaluating training's impact: The Success Case Method (SCM).

Based on careful analysis of participants' first-person accounts of their experiences in a training initiative, SCM doesn't just measure the impact of training, but pinpoints the very factors that make or break training success. Filled with examples, illustrations, tools, and checklists, Telling Training's Story not only shares the power of the Success Case Method to evaluate training, it also offers practical step-by-step guidelines for increasing the ROI of future learning and performance initiatives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781605093871

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Reviews for Telling Training's Story

[paulsignorelli_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Robert Brinkerhoff, in describing his “Success Case Method to Improve Learning and Performance,” accomplishes at least two important objectives: he provides an easy-to-replicate method for determining whether training is producing measurable results, and he argues for evaluations which recognize that “training is only one of many contributors to the goals that we seek to achieve from training” (p. 7). His entire evaluation system is built on the proposition that what occurs in a training session is a small part of what is needed to produce effective learning opportunities, and the sample surveys and case studies he includes in the book provide templates and models for anyone interested in implementing a similar system to change “non-successes” into successes.