Finding the Story in the data

Story-in-the-data-e1563790146660-300x214.png?profile=RESIZE_710xJune the 11th 2019 was the date for the Learning Technologies Summer Forum in ExCel London and I was asked to run a session on "Finding the Story in the Data". Here are some of my notes and thoughts about the session. 

This session was a practical nitty gritty sort of event. I think people did forgive me if I was teaching my grandmother to suck eggs but I do hear from a lot of L&D people who just don’t know where to start. Data is all over the place and you can easily get swamped. So the purpose of this session was to get people started and get some confidence in looking at data in apractical way. 

I started by asking a question: "Why bother collecting or analysing data?".

Here are some of the reasons collected from the Learning and Skills group webinar by the same name the week before. 

The chart was put together by Laura Overton and reproduced with her permission.

The two main reasons as you can see are to improve the user experience and also understand the effects or benefits. Not surprising really and in a report by Towards Maturity from 2018 they speak about 91% of the top deck saying that their learning interventions were aligned to the business goals. In order to do that, you need to be measuring what you are doing.

Other reasons may be:

  1. Credibility
  2. To check if things are going to plan
  3. Demonstrate the value brought by L&D
  4. Transition from learning provide to performance enhancer
  5. Avoid the sheep dip approach
  6. It is expected
  7. Stakeholder buy-in

Picture1.png?profile=RESIZE_710xMy engineering brain….. in a former life I was a chemical engineer and fuel technologist and if you think that it is all about data and analysis with no room for intuition, then let me share a little story:

As an engineer, gathering data to site wind turbines, I became very skilled at finding appropriate sites just by looking at a map. This helped me to narrow down where to look from a myriad of places, that might be suitable. I would look at the maps, gather data from a mast and correlate it to the nearest met station. It is no different in L&D. You can use your intuition to see where things might be going wrong, from the data that you are already collecting and from your stakeholders. This means you can collect limited and focussed data to confirm your suspicions, to begin to find the story in the data.

Understanding the link between data and performance is crucial, as per the diagram below.

Knowing when to collect quantitative or qualitative data is also important.

Working through a case study helped participants decide when it was appropriate to gather quantitative data and then qualitative. A crucial part of this thinking was to think broader than the case study which is a great piece of advice to anyone doing their own analysis. Look and see what is happening in your industry just in case the sudden drop in sales is industry wide and not just a blip in your own organisation. It could save you a lot of time!

I then challenged the participants to say what they saw in a number of different graphs , encouraging them to be playful to find the story in the data. Sometimes the graphs raised more questions than they answered but it certainly gave everyone an insight into how easy it is to use Excel and simple charts to uncover that story.

IMG_5742-e1563797779372-235x300.jpeg?profile=RESIZE_710xI just had to share this picture from LTSF19 - Rachael Orchard, my fabulous host for the session, kindly brought her stormtrooper so we could endlessly make Star Wars puns and then playful Don Taylor agreed to pose with us both!

If you are keen to learn more about data and the link to performance then use this link to order your book "Finding the Story in the Data" with a 20% discount for people on the DPG community (use the code DPG2019)

 

 

 

 

 

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Krystyna Gadd FLPI Assoc CIPD is Author of "How Not To Waste Your Money On Training" and Founder of How to Accelerate Learning

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