School of PE Blog

Professional development is an intentional act of gaining new skills through education programs, career training, workshops, professional certification programs, and a myriad of other programs. The intention of these programs specifically is to gain quality experience within your niche. Professional development is a proven way to advance your career, create valuable networking opportunities, and gain new high-value clients.

Opportunities for PD can be given by your employer or pursued as an individual or group without the help of the company. However, most businesses do offer to cover some of the expenses involved if you choose to take this route.

As a businessperson, understanding the impact of individual professional development activity is an important part of identifying which programs to use for your individual circumstances. In this blog, we’ll discuss why you should measure the impact of professional development, the levels of professional development evaluation, and seven steps to measure the impact of your professional development programs.

Why would an organization decide to utilize professional development? Professional development goals include, but are certainly not limited to:

These are only a few of the reasons why professional development is an important part of a working environment.

First and foremost, professional development programs require significant time and money input to complete. In order to understand the impact that the program has on your team, you need to understand if the amount of investment in the program is equivalent to the amount of information and experience your team gains from participation.

Second, this measurement involves a systematic process that you can use to demonstrate its usefulness to your team’s stakeholders. It can help you demonstrate to them the program outcomes, gain additional support, identify ways in which the program itself can improve, and help you make more strategic decisions moving forward.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created a heavily detailed guide to measure professional development, and this guide identified the five levels of professional development evaluation.

It’s not necessary to measure each of these areas. Instead, identifying the focus level that will give you the most accurate representation of your professional development impact and the ultimate goal of the evaluation will eliminate unnecessarily wasted time on your part.

Before you begin, put together a team you know will be able to conduct the evaluation thoroughly. Having somebody experienced in the evaluation process is a huge bonus and will make it go that much smoother. Make sure you have all the resources necessary to begin the evaluation, such as time, funds, and a good data system in place. When you have this setup, enact these seven steps to evaluate the impact of your professional development programs.

Identify and Engage Key Stakeholders- Stakeholders are the individuals or groups that have invested their resources into your operation. They are critical components to the growth and professional development of your business. Stakeholders can include policymakers, teachers and staff, parents and students, and community members. In order to gain the information you need from them,

Describe Professional Development Activities and Goals- Effective evaluations require a full understanding of the activity or program in need of evaluation. Define the type of activities by their format and method of delivery, behavior goals, long-term goals, and support systems within the structure that reinforce certain practices gained. What learning outcomes do you expect to gain from the program itself?

Define Your Evaluation Objectives and Questions- Create a list of definitive objectives that help you create strong and achievable evaluation goals. Be sure to include your stakeholders in this process so they can be active advocates for the evaluation and PD program itself. In these meetings, include the reasons for evaluating the program and list every objective that’s immediately clear.

Consider each objective in terms of professional development evaluation, returning to each level of evaluation: implementation, reaction, learning, behavior, and impact. Create question groups designed specifically to evaluate the program. This is not the same as questions created for a survey of other people and what they gained from the program; instead, they should be geared towards its overall objectivity.

Identify the Indicators You Will Measure- These indicators define the state, degree, extent, or quality of the process or outcome you need to evaluate. What you evaluate will directly correlate with the objectives, questions, and levels of evaluation. Your indicators should be measurable, specific, and relevant. Your terminology should be neutral so that it can be measured at any point in time. This eliminates the need for continual measurement.

Consider indicators that can give immediately available or easily collected data. Use indicators that are appropriate for the general participants and settings. They need to be relevant to the people involved. Lastly, having indicators that are comparable to previously observed instances that can change over time can give a better evaluation.

Collect Data- How will you collect your data? There are many methods that you can use, and the method you choose will depend heavily on the type you need. Do you need qualitative, quantitative, or both types of data? Quantitative data are useful for demonstrating the degree of change, while qualitative can be used to describe what happened during the program and why it was successful or not. Common data collection methods are questionnaires or surveys, observations, interviews, focus groups, logs, and records.

Further, what data already exists that matches your indicators? Is there another report elsewhere in the history of your organization that can give you the information you need or something to which to compare your new data set? Choose the most appropriate data collection method to match your indicators and evaluation level. Another key factor is the timing in which you collect data. Collecting data before, during, immediately after, and as a follow-up will give you a vast amount of usable information.

Analyze and Interpret the Results- Data analysis is the process of examining facts and findings in order to find usable information within the data set. There are three different types of analysis: descriptive, inferential, and qualitative analysis. Select the approach based on the data available and the frequency and timing.

Share and Use the Findings- Finally, share your findings with your stakeholders and other interested parties. This can come in the form of written reports like white papers and presentations or other more engaging formats that are more available to a wider range of audience. There are many avenues that you could take for sharing your results, such as blog posts, social media, book reports, newsletters, etc.

Sharing your findings should be thorough, ensuring that you’ve addressed each concern. Your report should be geared towards your specific objective of the evaluation, such as gaining more funding opportunities for professional development or improving the delivery method of the program. This ensures that your objective is met and that the report has the desired impact.

Professional development is a necessary avenue to take for the edification and growth of a business, its teams, and the individuals that make up the company. Without it, the workforce stagnates. Learning new skills and taking on more responsibilities helps individuals feel a sense of accomplishment that is unmatched. However, it’s important to know when the programs you’re using are outdated or that you’ve simply outgrown them. By taking the time to create an accurate evaluation of the programs you use and the impact they have on your team, you’ll be able to satisfy stakeholders, create better investment opportunities, and create a vast network of peers and clients who know they can trust you.

Want to supplement your team with professional development? Find the right program now at School of PE.