Optimize Your Greatest Asset -- Your People: How to Apply Analytics to Big Data to Improve Your Human Capital Investments

Preface

In 2005, I went to the Masie Conference in Florida. It was the first industry conference I had attended since we started Capital Analytics (now Vestrics) the year before. The conference was very interesting with presentations on a wide variety of topics related to learning. However, there were very few presentations at the conference related to measuring and evaluating learning. Those that discussed measurement focused on how to create and deploy better surveys. Among over 100+ scheduled presentations, there was one breakout session on the topic of the return on investment (ROI) of training investments. Approximately 50 people showed up for the discussion, so we put our chairs in a large oval in a banquet room. I was very excited to participate in what I considered the most important topic of the conference. A professor from one of the East Coast business schools kicked off the discussion. The attendees represented middle to senior management learning executives from some of the world's largest and best-known corporations, as well as representatives from many prestigious universities. I was eager to hear from the industry as my team had just started to apply advanced analytics to measure training programs.

For the first 30 minutes or so, one executive after another stated that you can't measure learning investments because people are too complicated and organizations are too complex. Generally, the group believed that measuring ROI was a waste of time and had no value. ...