Abstract
The importance of training as a determiner of a company’s performance is widely acknowledged: the “Canton Ticino” (Switzerland) has to demonstrate that the organisational decisions (such as whether or not to maintain a training programme) are based on a strategic learning process. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the evaluation process of a training programme conducted for a group of Swiss public managers. In order to measure the impact of the training, the first three (Reaction, Learning, Behaviour) of the four levels identified in Kirkpatrick’s model (1994) were measured, using an ex-post analysis. In particular, the chapter is focused on the changes at behavioural level.
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Notes
- 1.
Article 24 of the LORD (Legge sull’ordinamento degli impiegati dello Stato e dei docenti del Canton Ticino—Law on the regulations of State employees and teachers of Canton Ticino) (1995) describes the role of Public Manager as follows: Public Managers organise, direct, coordinate and check the work of their collaborators.
They contribute to the promotion and implementation of all the measures aimed at improving the efficiency and the quality of the performance of their service, ensuring that the service operates correctly.
- 2.
USM is the current name of the office specialised in management training. It was originally called CEFOS (CEntro FOrmazione e Sviluppo—Centre for Training and Development) and this former name is used in some documents cited in this chapter.
- 3.
Many authors refer to the training assessment: Training Validation System (TVS) by Fitz-Enz (1994); Input, Process, Output/ Outcome (IPO) by Bushnell (1990); Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) by Worthen and Sanders (1987); the five level evaluation model of Kaufman et al. (1995); the Context, Inputs, Reactions and Outcomes (CIRO) Approach of Warr et al. (1970). Holton (1998) focuses on the transfer process; Tannenbaum et al. (1991) on training effectiveness; Matthieu et al. (1993) on training outcomes. Finally, Noe (1986), Olsen (1998), Winfred and Winston (2003) and Van Buren and Erskine (2002) confirm the Kirkpatrick taxonomy effectiveness.
- 4.
Kirkpatrick’s 4th level has been excluded since it is extremely complex to record.
- 5.
Each FD made her/his decisions in full autonomy, working under different managers and with different collaborators, so the influences affecting those who completed the questionnaires differ for each member of the statistical population.
- 6.
The reference environments are diversified in terms of:
-
1.
Level of certainty/uncertainty related to:
-
Clarity of tasks
-
Difficulty of the work executed by them
-
-
2.
Feed-back time for finding out the outcome of action taken;
-
3.
Level of influence on the people occupying other organisational roles, in terms of:
-
Strategic success of the business
-
Relative importance of each environmental subsystem (Lawrence and Lorsch 1970).
-
In addition to this, the environments do not affect each other and are in different developmental contexts (some departments are developing strongly, while others are being redefined/resized, etc.).
-
1.
- 7.
See Chap. 2; note that these skills derive from the suggestions made by the FDs during the shared design process.
- 8.
N.B. some courses focus on more than one skill. For example, the “Delegating” course develops the skills associated with human resource management, together with those related to organisational efficiency. The managerial skills to which the courses refer were defined by examining the topics confronted.
- 9.
N.B. some assessment items indicate more than one skill: for example, “delegate” can be associated with either “Human Resource Management Skills” or “Tendency to Organisational Efficiency”.
In order to obtain an unequivocal assessment of the impact made by the training courses on the skills, we decided to ascribe only one skill, based on the actual contents of the lessons.
- 10.
It should be noted that the value ascribed to each question varies from 1 to 6. The responses of the FDs, the SGs and the collaborators are grouped together.
- 11.
Here, one is forced to talk about the “possession” and not “acquisition” of skills, because as this is a control sample, it is not possible to make an “ex-ante ex-post” comparison.
- 12.
This table is an extremely condensed indicator obtained by taking a simple average of the 3 averages (FD, SG and COLL) of the assessment for each skill.
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Martone, A., Sciaroni, F., Righetti, A. (2018). Measuring the Impact of Training on Public Manager Performance: The Case of Canton Ticino (An Ex-Post Analysis). In: Borgonovi, E., Anessi-Pessina, E., Bianchi, C. (eds) Outcome-Based Performance Management in the Public Sector. System Dynamics for Performance Management, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57018-1_12
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