There’s an ancient joke in the training business that goes like this:

Executive: “Why should I train my people — just to have them get better and then leave?”

Training Professional: “Would you rather have them know nothing and hang around?”

Everyone agrees that the development of skilled employees is good for the organization. But that’s easier said than done. Employees, managers and executives often have differing (and perhaps competing) ideas about what skills need to be developed, how skill development will be implemented and managed and how to measure the effects of the program once it begins.

Many organizations have opted for automating the administration of learning development through the application of Learning Management Systems (LMS) aka Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). These are software systems designed to support teaching and learning in an educational setting, usually over an intranet or extranet. The LMS/VLE provides tools for grading/evaluating a student’s work, sending and receiving email, putting courses online, administering student groups, collecting and organizing student grades, tracking tools, etc. An open-source example of an LMS would be Moodle which is currently being used by LSU and thousands of other schools around the world.

However, an LMS alone will not (cannot) address the greater issue: executive management needs a way to integrate learning with performance in a measurable way. This is where Performance Management Systems come in.

The ultimate goal isn’t simply to develop the skills of the employee or achieve greater employee engagement. Achievement of those goals must be aligned with a larger goal: the need for management to improve business performance. And if that isn’t enough, there also has to be a way to measure the value of these training and development initiatives.

The key is in management and evaluation of the training initiatives which is linked to the evaluation of the employee’s overall performance, before and after they engage with the training program. A good performance management system can do this.

For example, perhaps your organization has already implemented an employee performance evaluation system. During performance evaluation time, an employee and their manager agree on a goal for upgrading the employee’s skills in a particular area. The suggested method of achieving this upgrade would be to complete a particular training course – which can be taken and/or tracked via the LMS. Management would give the employee access to the coursework and once the employee has completed the coursework, the manager can reassess the employee’s progress at the next evaluation. In this way, management can get a measurement of an employee’s improvement in that area.

Performance management systems offer a lot of benefits.

• Easily identify individual and organizational skill development needs and provide the right training and development activities that improve business performance.
• Ensure individual and group training programs are aligned with development plans, performance gaps, succession needs and, most importantly, corporate goals.
• Make a training catalog easily accessible to managers and employees, when and where they need it.
• Measure the effectiveness of employee skills development programs by tracking employee performance improvements over time.
• Empower employees to manage their own skills, performance and development plans, all from one place – building employee engagement.

What is attractive about these systems is that you can link learning with performance in a practical, measurable way, thereby providing an evaluation mechanism that helps to measure return on the organization’s investment in training and learning.