Measuring Time to Capability – Level 4 Evaluation

Ultimately, the goal of Level 4 evaluation is to determine if training has resulted in a measurable impact on the organization's mission, or on those organizational performance indicators deemed to be reflective of the overall strategic performance of the organization.

Typically, Level 4 evaluations gauge organizational impact in terms of return on investment (ROI). However, because ROI is inherently a measure of financial performance and therefore better suited to the private sector, it is a less appropriate measure for calculating the organizational impact of public sector training programs.

Current practices in the professional training community are shifting away from total reliance on return on investment (ROI) calculations as measures of training program impact, in part because organizations are often confused about which financial indicators to measure and which of these can be linked directly to training. Other approaches are being explored; one of these alternative approaches is "time to capability," which is a measure of productivity improvement over time (and by a "critical mass" of employees) rather than a purely financial impact. In other words, an organization is attempting to use training to improve the efficiency with which people do their jobs rather than searching for metrics that link training directly to balance sheet improvements.

In its simplest form, Time to Capability is defined as the validated accumulation over time of employees who have been trained in specific competencies deemed critical to the success of an organizational unit. Once a predetermined number of employees have been trained (as measured by their passage through Level 2 and Level 3 stage gates), "critical mass" is achieved and the organization is said to have acquired a predetermined and required organization-wide capability in the specific competencies. Once a critical mass of employees have achieved the desired level of capability, then measurements of impact on organizational performance indicators can be undertaken. These measurements of impact, when converted to dollar values, can be compared with the cost of training to measure training value.