PSA has recognized that there are immense resources being spent for professional development across the US. The costs to customers, of many of these programs, seems extremely high compared to the actual benefits and comprehensiveness of the trainings offered. Especially for those enterprise solutions aimed at the cadre of enterprise managers and supervisory personnel. One can presume there’s an opportunity here for great advances in both the usefulness of the training, and its cost/ benefit ratio.

Professional development as is, also brings up issues of what is a bona fide certification, and who sets the standards for what constitutes same. One might expect professional development to become a disrupted industry, with new “platforms” becoming available, connected in some way to Big Data and real-time multimedia distribution.

Here’s Kirkpatrick one  of the leading practitioners of the above , explaining/ selling their program…which is quite pricey… in this case, 2K for 2 days! for just the “Bronze” level. What would the gold level “go for”? For the record, this is not a full in depth evaluation of the Kirkpatrick Method, or similar, which would require a great deal of research to evaluate.

This is just to suggest there may well be room for improvement in the professional development field which one presumes has at least some quality training involved, and of which, Kirkpatrick might well be an outstanding vendor of same. 

In general, one might assume this level of cost for 2 days of training…and just the bronze level at that…is overpriced and oversold. But you know what they say about assumptions.

One can “achieve” the Kirkpatrick Certified Professional, Bronze level from Kirkpatrick.. so they are not only doing the “training” but they are the ones setting the standards and providing the certification. Hmmm.

During this program, you will learn the four levels of training evaluation, receive a participant manual filled with examples and templates that you may borrow and adapt to build your own Blended Evaluation Plan^® tools, and gain a complete understanding of what each level measures. You will also explore the reasons why training evaluation is critical to training success and hear case studies and success stories from companies that have used the Kirkpatrick Model effectively. You will learn tactics to help you to allocate training resources effectively.

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