Proof: how will you make sure your trainees are meeting their performance standard?

      It’s always important for trainers to know their training is effective, and there is a growing focus on the different levels of evaluation, from the “smile sheets” we give out at the end of a workshop to a full financial return on investment - and beyond!

      For environmental trainers, there is often an additional impetus, which is the need for compliance monitoring to ensure that organizations are meeting their legal obligations under environmental laws. Many are required to monitor their own compliance with various operating permits, and environmental regulators often have pollution hotlines or well-publicized phone numbers for the public to report matters of interest from smoky vehicle exhausts to over-use of water. Some also have formal systems for regular inspections of activities of particular concern.

      Effective environmental training is only one part of a wider environmental training program and such programs need to be set up so that their outcomes and effectiveness can be evaluated. This needs to be done right from the very beginning of any program. Likewise, the level of compliance with your environmental performance standards or guidelines will be part of your assessment of the effectiveness of your training. 

      A number of people in the training profession have identified seven levels of evaluation of the effectiveness of training. Levels 1-4 are from Donald Kirkpatrick, Level 5 is from Jack Philips and Levels 6 and 7 are from Alastair Rylatt – the sources are listed below. The seven levels are:

• Level 1 – Reaction: Did they like it? 
• Level 2 – Learning: What did they learn from it? 
• Level 3 – Performance: What can they do as a result of it? 
• Level 4 – Results: Was the training worthwhile? 
• Level 5 – ROI: Did it produce a financial return on investment? 
• Level 6 – Sustainability: has it become ‘how we do things around here’? 
• Level 7 – Sharing the benefit: how is this helping others and the planet? 

      So there are two layers of “proof” or evaluation: effectiveness of your training; and effectiveness of the wider environmental management program to which your training contributes. 

      Regular site inspections will give you good information for both - and in many jurisdictions, the costs of these inspections can be recovered from the organization holding the relevant environmental permits. From an environmental regulator's point of view, this is good news: the funding doesn’t come out of rates!

      How does this analysis work if you are a corporate or not-for-profit interested in environmental training? How does it work if you are an environmental regulator?

This blog is the last in my series of Top Five Tips for people starting to think about setting up or expanding an environmental training program. The other four were on Partnership, Personas, Performance and Process.


What’s your hot topic for environmental training? Contact me here or make a comment below and I’d be delighted to respond with some thoughts.

The information in this blog is drawn from comes from Chapter 6 and part of Chapter 8.3 of my book ‘Seven Steps to Successful Environmental Training’. Thanks again to the New Zealand Association of Training and Development, from which I’ve learned so much about training evaluation; and as always to Ann Andrews for encouraging me to disseminate this material more widely.

The three sources of the seven levels of evaluation are (1) Kirkpatrick, Donald, 1998, Evaluating Training Programs: the Four Levels. Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. San Francisco; (2) Philips, Dr Jack, 1997, Return on Investment in Training and Performance Improvement Programs. Butterworth Heinemann; and (3) Rylatt, Alastair, 2003, Beyond ROI – seven levels of evaluation. An article in People and Performance, the magazine of the New Zealand Association of Training and Development, June 2003.