Psyched For Business Podcast Episode 14
Episode 14:
The Importance of Measuring and Evaluating L&D with Dr Peter Pease
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Episode 14 - Transcript
Voiceover 0:00
Welcome to Psyched for Business, helping business leaders understand and apply cutting edge business psychology principles in the workplace.
Richard Anderson 0:14
Hi, and welcome to Psyched for Business. My name is Richard Anderson. Thank you for joining me. In this episode I'm joined by Dr. Peter Pease. Peter is a business psychologist and l&d practitioner, who has over 20 years experience in running his own business relating to learning and development. In this episode, Peter talks us through the importance of measurement and evaluating L&D, it's a subject I'm very interested in, and I hope you've enjoyed the episode. Thanks again for listening.
Peter Pease, welcome to Psyched for Business. How are you doing?
Peter Pease 0:48
Very well. Thank you. Thanks very much for having me on.
Richard Anderson 0:51
Well, I've been trying to get you on probably for the thick end of a year. But I don't think our paths have perfectly aligned to do this. But you and I, when when did we? When did we first meet? In fact, I know when it was it was just before COVID? Because we had a meeting, you came into the office and I think it was February. And I thought you were clairvoyant, because you said something along the lines of I think this is going to be a little bit worse than this. This might be this might be a big problem for all of us. And what you were right about that?
Peter Pease 1:26
Yeah, no, I was well, I'd actually I think just been to Ireland, I sort of finished my PhD, I had a sabbatical. The reason I came to see us because I was looking for a platform to turn my PhD into a psychometric test, because I developed a psychometric as part of my PhD. And I think I just been in Ireland for a week. And we were just in that thing where I think Ireland had maybe just locked down. And I came back from Ireland thinking, what are we doing? You know, why aren't we? Why aren't we acting, acting now? And and yeah, maybe that was my anxiety and caution, kind of litigate being on display there. But yeah, I was. And yeah, and I think I was right. But, but I think a lot of other people. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of other people much cleverer than me, were suggesting that, that, you know, we needed to do something and doing crazy and the thing that was three years ago, now, we're sitting here on the 22nd of March as we record this, yeah, three years as possible. Yeah.
Richard Anderson 2:33
Got to know you've, you know, very well, I would say over the last three years, we've been fortunate to work with you, and you've been a, you know, a great contact, referring to me for various different things. And, Peter, it's funny, because I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself in a second. And I know that you've worn many hats throughout your career. So I'm very keen to hear how you introduce yourself. And I know you've been in academia, you've been in business, and entrepreneur, lots of different things. So who is Peter Pease?
Peter Pease 3:02
Well, that could take up the next. undefined if you think of that as a kind of a more philosophical question. I'm still struggling with what the? But yeah, so me. I originally did an undergraduate course in psychology at Durham, I graduated in 1987. And then set up my own business in learning and development, which is kind of what I did for the next 25 years. I think it's fair to say that in the early to mid 80s, we were pretty much taught that in terms of psychometrics, they didn't have a huge amount to offer the world of business. People like Samsung and Holdsworth, SHL were kind of getting going. And there were some sort of green shoots. So I kind of went into business and into the learning and development world kind of really thinking that, you know, psychometric psychology, you know, it was it was a really interesting thing. I was interested in it, but I didn't really see much sort of, of practical value, how wrong how wrong was I and as things developed over over the next sort of 2025 years or so, my business trajectory, mainly around learning and development, we grew to at one stage having 120 employees and 1200 learners in a single year. We did quite a lot of public sector UK based stuff. We work with big names like, you know, Nike and PepsiCo. Rolls Royce. We did most things you could think of leadership, management development, a lot of sales enablement, sales training, little bit of stuff around compliance. We also had a recruitment business at one stage and did a lot of IT stuff. As I said, I could go on for a very long time. It's interesting. I'll fast track that. 2011 We sold our last lending endeavor. Our business which was actually in logistics and renewables, and that is still going strong, I'm pleased to say. And I decided at that stage that I wanted to do something else with my life. In fairness, I was probably pretty burnt out, we'd had a sort of difficult few years after 2007. And I decided to get back into academia. So I did a master's in occupational psychology at Northumbria University was that that was good. And we might talk a bit about that, because I decided to do some research around learning journeys and about how salespeople learn. Yeah, that was part of my master's thesis. And I still use some of that. So maybe we could pick up on that as part of this rambling, rambling conversation. And then I, after my master's, I played around with one or two other business ideas, try doing something retailing with my daughter, which kind of didn't really get going. And then in 2015, I landed at Northumbria again, and ended up running with some colleagues, a business startup program for, for undergraduates three year degree program, where they learned by doing rather than by having lectures, very much sort of co-creating the learning. And alongside that I did a PhD, where I developed a model of psychological capital specifically for early startup entrepreneurs. But the model applies equally well to salespeople, to leaders and managers. And I guess just picking up on that the thing I was interested in there was how you measure the stuff that changes, I think, a lot of personality, measurement and a lot of the psychometrics, we do try to capture what somebody is like, at a particular point in time, what I'm kind of really interested in is how we measure the things that change things that we can influence. And there are models around things like psychological hope, optimism, resilience, that you can change over time, but they're not like they're not fleeting things like emotions, like, you know, you might feel happy or sad, fleetingly sets these things that are relatively stable, but not as stable as your personality. So I finished my finished my PhD, was working part time at the university. And then I thought about trying to do something with my PhD stuff around business startups and business growth. But that didn't really kind of take off. And what I've ended up doing, I left the University last year in 2022, although I'm still acting as a visiting, visiting lecturer there. I've been playing around with learning analytics with measurement and evaluation in learning and development. And we've just finished a big kind of piece of research on that, which I'd be really happy to talk about as well.
Richard Anderson 8:16
Well, Peter, that's a fantastic introduction, and probably loads to dissect there and a few directions that we can take the conversation, but maybe let's start at the beginning. I'm really interested in learning, ironically, from you why, why learning and developing because I know it's an area that you're hugely passionate about. But But what why l&d?
Peter Pease 8:33
I think it probably started when I was at school. And I would sit in classrooms and and I think I can remember doing this when I was literally nine or 10. And I would assess the teachers, I would see some really horrible, isn't it? But some of them. And bear in mind, you know, I was at a single SEC school in the in the 1970s and 80s. And We gave our teachers a really hard time gave each other quite a hard time. Yeah. And I'm probably slightly ashamed of some of the some of the antics that we that we used to do. And I do want to tell you one or two stories about that this might not make it to the podcast, but as we say, so if you've got a class of 30 children, yeah. And people start making random noises, it can a noise, it can annoy the teacher quite a bit.
So what we worked out is that if you hum, you can't actually tell where the noise is coming from. And we would we would have this thing where different people in different parts of the room would start humming. The teacher would go around the room getting increasingly cross, you know, not knowing Wherever, wherever, wherever noise is coming from. Yeah.
So I think I classified teachers into three or four different sorts, that were the ones who were, you know, really fierce, who you didn't mess around with. But who may or may not have been good teachers, but you certainly didn't mess around with them. There were the ones who were a bit hopeless, who we spent an awful lot of time trying to distract. And most of them weren't particularly good teachers, either, because he didn't learn a great deal, I suppose it's whether you learn anything, which is, which is what matters. And then there was some in the middle who kind of had this sweet spot where they were, they had a lot of presents, they managed to control the class, they made the topic interesting, they were really good at explaining things in an adaptive way. So that, you know, if I didn't understand something, they worked out how to explain it to me, so that it made sense to me. But they also managed to make it fun. And there were a small number of teachers who were kind of good at doing that. So when I left university and decided to set up my own business, it wasn't originally going to be around learning or training and development as we called it, then. But we kind of drifted into that.
But it was much more around corporate corporate learning. So there's a bit of me that I think is kind of always wanted to be a teacher. And certainly when I was at school, we had this kind of Cadet thing. And I ended up being an instructor teaching other people how to how to do how to do stuff in the cadets. And I've kind of got that, I don't know if it's a genetic thing. But I've kind of got that predisposition. And I sometimes have conversations with other psychologists about, you know, whether you're really into kind of selection, assessment, or whether you're more into assessment for learning and development. And I'm through and through learning and developments interested in that. And if I'm completely honest, and I'm sorry, if I offend any of your listeners here, I find I find selection assessment, quite dull. It's just doesn't do it. It just doesn't do it. For me, what we'll have to do is next time, we'll have to get somebody on the really passionate about selection assessment. And they can say, well, maybe I can just facilitate this, this sort of panel and even talk about why. I just thought no, I Yeah. I mean, I have some of the issues are ethical. But but it's actually I think more that what what gets my juices going is being with a group of people seeing the light switch on, yeah, helping them to grow. Our company, kind of strapline for that sort of first 25 years was developing human potential. And I kind of feel that we have the potential as human beings, to help other people to develop.
Richard Anderson 12:59
And, and I think there is, you know, whether it's as a parent or a teacher or a trainer, I personally think there's no greater joy, than than being able to do that. Yeah, if you if you can see somebody improve, or somebody grow in a particular area, and you've had some sort of involvement with that, I can imagine this, there's very few things more rewarding. And you see it with kids. And now, you know, as you know, I've got two two young children and my elder has come on leaps and bounds recently, I think that in a huge part of the teaching that he's received, and he's had kind of tailored learning to his specific requirements and needs. And I think that's, that's massively important. So I'm fully with you on on that. And it's funny with learning and development, because I've worked as you know, for some time, not just in Evolve, but I've been in this kind of world of HR tech for a considerable period of time, and sold solutions and partnered with organizations in learning and development. But it's only been very recently where I've probably realized the importance of that for our staff. So we have I think, maybe seven stuff soon to be, hopefully soon to be nine. And I think it's really, really important to have staff go through learning or training programs. But it's only been recently I've decided to do that as previously. I've probably seen it as a little bit of a nice to have, do you do you find that that's quite a common approach or a common sorry, attitude with people that l&d is maybe a maybe a nice to have, particularly for smaller businesses?
Peter Pease 14:43
Yeah, I think that's a really good question. So for companies of your size, to be investing as much money as you do in learning and development, I think is is unusual. It's really good. I think yeah, as you know, we've some bits and pieces together on this. And I think I've said to you, you know, we kind of had a sort of a team development session. And I've rarely seen a team, even in a company as small as yours, which is, you know, so happy. So on political. So, you know, we talk about psychological safety a lot. And you know, you can't learn if you haven't got psychological safety.
Richard Anderson 15:28
So yeah, I think listeners who don't know what psychological safety is Peter, would you mind just explaining that?
Peter Pease 15:33
Yeah, so I'm not an expert on psychological. And I know other people, you know, somebody's doing a PhD on it. But yeah, that's, that's a good, good question. So psychological safety, is about having an environment where people feel able to speak openly. And honestly, there's a lot more to it than that. But it means that if I don't understand something, I can say, I don't understand that without feeling that I'm going to get sort of, you know, dismissed or laughed out, it means that if somebody in the team or in the session, is doing something that is upsetting me, I feel like I can call that out. And I can say, actually, you know, that language you're using, you know, I find that a bit offensive, and nobody's gonna, you will, will will always have situations of conflict within teams. But it's having that fundamental trust that you can, you can say what you need to say, without without feeling that there are going to be repercussions. I just Google psychological safety. I mean, it's it's becoming a really big thing. And there are various tools out there that you can psychometric instruments you can use to measure levels of psychological safety. Yeah.
But coming coming back to the bigger question, learning and development is, I think, really interesting, because if you think about it, when organizations get into trouble, so it might be they get taken to an employment tribunal, or, or it might be that one of the directors, you know, has to leave because he's done something inappropriate, or she's done something inappropriate. The solution very often is around training and development. So we have, we have a situation where we will have to do loads of compliance training. Because if something goes wrong, we can then say to the regulatory authorities, we've done the training, we're covered. Yeah. But the but the counter to that is in an economic downturn, learning and development is often one of the functions that gets cut first. And I think that that is often because it doesn't manage to justify its existence, it doesn't manage to show that the money that is invested in it actually delivers a tangible return. And it's not because that's more difficult to do. So you have you're pulling together a business case for learning and development, you're trying to demonstrate return on investment, is it? Is it is it a bit more subjective as it is it is it is really difficult, it's really difficult to do. And I think that if I go back to the early days of my business, when I was actually sending other people on on training courses, they would come back and they and I would say, Oh, hey, how was how was it? And they'd say, Oh, it was great fun. And I'd say yeah, but did you actually learn any fish? And we did, you know, within within our training and development programs, we created tools, so that people not only filled in a happy sheet to say whether they'd enjoyed it or not. But they actually created an action list of things they were going to do differently, we would audit the action list. And as far as possible, we would try and do some sort of cost benefit analysis within within that process. But it is really difficult to do. Yeah, I went to the ATD conference in the States last year. And there were 18 sessions on kind of impact measurement and evaluation. And one of the one of the sessions I attended, which must have had about 120 people in the opening question from the person running the session was, how many people here collect level one data and by level one data, I'll say a bit more about that in a moment. That means kind of like the happy sheets the learner reaction, what what in the states are often referred to as smile sheets. Kirkpatrick is level one, you know, so they asked how many people collect level one data and never get around to analyzing it, and over half the audience put their hands up
Okay, yeah. And I think that tell it is it is difficult to do, even even at that level. But I think one of the promises that we kind of often end up trying to measure the wrong the wrong things. So we put a huge amount of effort into measuring learner learner reaction, not into trying to measure whether or not people's behavior has changed, and whether or not that has had an impact on organizational input, also, in order to denotational organizational performance. So So, so just so I've understood that so the way that we're measuring the impact of l&d is probably is, we're probably using the wrong the wrong, the wrong way of measuring it. So we need to be measuring behavioral change, or the the model, the model that's been used since the 1950s, was developed by somebody called Donald Kirkpatrick. If you talk to learning and development people, we've done this big piece of research, I think, out of 300 and odd people that that that I've had conversations with over the last year, only one hasn't heard of. Kirkpatrick Yeah. So the Kirkpatrick levels are our level one learning reaction. Level two is whether or not knowledge has been gained. So people measure that with tests. And I know, with some of your sort of tests that you run for clients who will be measuring, you know, knowledge.
And I know that your previous company that you worked at, you know, learner assessment was a key part of what has been on the platforms. The third thing is behavior change, okay. And that is, you know, whether or not people have actually changed the way they behave on the job. And the fourth thing is impact on the organization or results. Now, since that model came out, some some other levels have been added. So levels zero now is often referred to as what people get off their learning management systems. Because bear in my back in the back in the good old days, if you wanted to do training, you were sent on a training course. And you then, you know, you either implemented what you learned or you didn't, or you didn't understand what you'd been taught, or you did. And it was much more discreet. Whereas now, an awful lot of training, the majority of learning and development is actually delivered through elearning. And it's fragmented. So you have, you know, which learners go on which courses, how often do they engage with the courses? Do they complete them? Do they progress from this level to the next level. So there's all of this kind of level zero data just about attendance and completion, which is also in the pot. And then some people called guy called Jack Phillips, in the back 30 years ago, developed a model specifically around ROI, return on investment, which he described as level five. And he ran something in the state school, the ROI Institute. And they do a lot of really interesting work around just measuring, just measuring ROI. But you asked another question, is it difficult to measure? The other thing is that it's really difficult to actually tease out the effects of learning and development. Okay.
So if I give you a tell you a story that so we, we did some work for a brewery in your kind of almost hometown? Yeah. And you eat or that we did some we did some sales training. And over a series of months, and the sales levels went up enormously. And we thought we've done a fantastic job. They thought we've done a fantastic job, salespeople thought we've done a fantastic job. And then the marketing people came along and said, the average temperature this summer was 1.6 degrees higher than it was last summer. So the reason people have drank more beer is because it's been warmer. Brackets, nothing to do with the learning.
Speaker 3 24:23
So how you tease out the effects is kind of kind of difficult. Yes. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is, and we'll I can now bore you a bit with my master's research is is actually that, that we learn naturally, anyway. Okay. So there's a model that I know we've talked about before, which is kind of like the 7020 10 model, which a lot of learning and development people are using now, which is where 70% of your learning actually just takes place on the job? Yes. 20 Send is kind of through semi structured social learning. And only 10% is through going off on on doing courses. Okay. So how do we how do we, you know, capture all of that? And it's not easy to do?
Richard Anderson 25:17
Yeah, no, it's not. And I'm just thinking now, when you're talking about the 70%, I wonder, and maybe this will take us off on a tangent, maybe we shouldn't go there. But how difficult it is now that a lot of people, you know, tremendous amount of people are now working completely remotely. And I would imagine that learning and development, and that's 70% might have been easier on the job when we're in the office together, and we're seeing other departments and people and what they do, and I don't know, anywhere, just that yeah, no,
Speaker 3 25:47
I think I think that's a really good point. And when we went hybrid or remote during the pandemic, and there were loads of discussions, my thing was just, you know, I kept on banging on about because it wasn't something that people kind of thought of first and foremost, was the kind of social learning that takes place at work. So if you think about it, so if I go, if I go to my, my masters,
Peter Pease 26:16
I'm cool, because because it because it is kind of relevant is I decided that I wanted to look at the effectiveness of sales training, yes, because my experience was that people would go on sales training courses, and their sales performance would tend to improve, and then it would kind of tail off. And when I looked into it, there's quite a lot of evidence that we sales training, people go on a sales training course. And it has a half life of about 45 days or so the, you know, over Yeah, over 90 to 120 day, so three to four months, most people's performance will have got almost back to where it was before they went on the training. And so is that about reinforcement is that about, you know, what is what, what, what is going on. So, what I decided to do was rather than taking a typical thing of taking sales training, and then trying to evaluate the impact is I did a piece of qualitative research. And I interviewed I think about 20, top performing salespeople. And I asked them to about their kind of learning journeys that they had taken from being a complete rookie, somebody who had never been in selling before, to some to,
to where they were now, which was kind of like, you know, identified by their employer as being one of their sort of top performing salespeople. And it was really, really interesting, because only one person, and okay, and this wasn't a statistically valid sample here. So you can't really generalize. But only one person mentioned formalized training, as having had a profound impact interest in his training and development. Quite a lot of people mentioned maybe maybe six or seven mentioned, the onboarding, the induction program that they that they've been through. But for most people, the things the themes that came out of it were around trial and error.
So there was one guy who, who's started off selling trucks. And, you know, on his first day, he was sent out into the wilderness to sell trucks, didn't know much about trucks didn't know anything about selling went into this large, large, large office, we asked who was responsible for buying trucks, and was pointed out to a man in man in man at the end of the room. So he walked up to him and said, Hello, I'm whatever his name was from wherever he was. And, and, you know, Can I Can I, can I talk to you about where you buy your trucks from? And the response was, from the guy sitting behind the desk was eff off. This was literally day one. And and he said, he said, Oh, I was just hoping you might give me five minutes of your time. And the second response was was, I told you, and that was it. So you know, what did he learned from that? Well, I guess he learned an element of resilience. And he carried on carried on gaining, but a lot of other people, particularly people, a little quite a few people working in recruitment businesses, who said they just learned so much from sitting in a room with their colleagues and hearing what they did. And I think probably the most important thing
I was having a coach or a mentor, who was kind of, you know, who kind of helped them and listened in on their calls and and saw them saw them saw them through it. And have you done any sales training along the way, with any of your training? Please, please do turn it around. Yes, I have done sales training. But I have to admit, I haven't done sales training formally in a long time, it must be 10 years since I've done it. And it was based on kind of more models and methodologies. And it was very much kind of classroom based training. If you like through a through an external consultant, it was very good. And actually, I did it with two lady that I've had on this this podcast previously called Jackie, she was she was great. But it was maybe one, one or two days of training, I had a little bit of coaching from from a sales manager in a previous role, but not Not, not a huge amount. But But I mean, I'm not saying I'm the greatest salesperson in the world, and you know, far from it. But I would quite agree to go along with that I think you make you make mistakes, it's trial and error. And that's definitely been what I think that's definitely what's improved, improve my communication and sales skills generally. But in terms of developing any of your team members have you're sorry, I thought you met me personally. That's fine as well.
Richard Anderson 31:30
Yes, so I have because I know the importance of it. So my my colleague will who's who kind of works in our kind of sales marketing role, he was pretty new to it. So one of the first things that I wanted to do was give him training and coaching. So we've worked with an external consultant who has worked very closely with will. And we also are starting to use coaching technology, as well. around that, and I'm about to invest again, in potentially both me and him in a in a sales coach as well, because I know the importance of it. And it doesn't matter how experienced you are or how old you get, I mean, I've made countless mistakes, and I'll have a lot of bad habits that need addressing. So yes, sorry, that's a long answer to the question. And not not at all. It's a good, but I think and I wonder if you resonate with this, and we're not. Sales is a small part of what I've done sort of sales training, but but I think it's quite interesting, because it's sort of very much in the moment, and you kind of get, you know, you either have a result or you don't. But I think I always find most difficult. And I wonder if you do too, is when you go on a joint sales call or sales meeting with somebody is actually being able to sit back and let them mess it up. Yeah.
Peter Pease 32:54
And, and I had occasions where I mean, I actually did this professionally with a with a with a with a sales team, for a client, and I would go out on calls with these people. And when they got to the point where I thought, well, they really have lost the sale here, I would come in and kind of rescue it. Yeah. And then when I did the feedback session afterwards, rather than and I just kind of say, you know, what, how did that go? Rather than then saying, Yeah, well, I got, you know, I didn't quite do this. And I was, you know, it was really great. They typically say, Well, you know, when you came in and you said whatever I was just about to say that.
And, and so actually learning to sit on your hands and see somebody else fail effectively, I think is incredibly difficult, but incredibly important. I fully agree. And it's funny as you talk through customer my memory back to my very first sales job. And it was for a company that sold software resources in education. So it's education resources for a specific subject within education. And we used to go into schools and pitch that it was very much a kind of pitching a product. It was a product, we do all of the qualification beforehand. And I remember going out with my all sales director, a guy called Stuart Horton, who was fantastic news, it must have influence on me.
And he sat there as a car crash this presentation to this group of teachers, and it was bloody awful. It was I was just at a presentation skills were poor. I couldn't command the room. I couldn't answer the questions that were asking me and he sat there and he was brilliant II could stand up in front of anybody and he would have them you know, wrapped around his little fingers. He was one of them was just a great salesperson and and he just sat there and said nothing. And I must have thought he must be mortified if you're watching me, you know, this car crash. But um, but he did that really, really well. And I have to say it was good for me. It was good for me that he let me do that because I got to learn from the experience and got his feedback afterwards. We didn't win the day.
But But there you go. So that is important. We had we had one, somebody who I'm employed to do tele sales, yeah. Years and years and years ago. And so I'm just going to say that I had a message saying we lost connection. So So I had somebody who worked for me years and years and years ago, in telesales. And we brought in some technology so that we could record phone calls. Hi. So I actually recorded so this is in the days of cassette tapes, which some of your listeners might not even know what they are. So so we had it, and I listened to her sales calls, on the way into work in the car the next day, and I almost crashed the car. absolutely appalling. So what I did, and I don't know if this was the right thing or the wrong thing, but I gave her the cassette, and I let her go into a room, and I let her listen to it for half an hour. And then I said to her, after we sat down that she looked absolutely ashen afterwards. And I said, what what do you what are your thoughts? And she said, Peter, I think you should fire me.
And it was really, it was really sad. But it was so powerful, it was so much more powerful than anything I could have said or done. And actually, she turned out to be absolutely fantastic. And, you know, grew out of the role I had for her in no time at all into a face to face selling role and then left us and went on and did amazing things afterwards. But going back to this master's research, yeah. And, and one of my key thoughts from that, is that human beings are our learning machines.
So what we, what we need to be doing is enabling people to learn, not teaching them stuff. So if you look at your children, and you look at how they learned how to walk, you know, there wasn't an awful lot that you could have done to to help them do that. Other than other than kind of make sure there weren't too many sharp objects around, encouraging them, you know, maybe sort of holding them up a little bit. But they'd have done that anyway, they'd have clambered up and then headed off and fall now. Think about how you learn to ride a bike and different people do it in different ways. But you, you know, you don't do a lecture on the dynamics of know how to ride a bike you there's a lot of trial and error. Certainly, you know, we tend to use balanced bikes now, which we didn't have it have in my day. But then think about driving a car. And, you know, there you then you know, formalized training does become more important, you do need to have theory and knowledge. And so it kind of becomes it kind of becomes more complex. And I think part of the challenge for us is to work out what bits we can do that actually make that actually make a difference. And, and if I kind of bring this back to psychometrics.
I think that where psychometrics can really help with learning and development is kind of in helping people with self awareness. So, you know, I've got clients and and I know you've got clients who use tests, psychic psychometric tests as or assessments to help their learners inform their journey. Yes. And I guess the thing that I'm still playing around with developing is how we also then create assessments that people use to measure to measure progress. And if you look at a lot of the assessments that learning and development people design and use, that they're not psychometrically valid, not there. If you look at the competency models that a lot of people use, you know, they don't have any predictive validity. They're just a string of kind of kind of words. So one of the things that that I think is sad is that there are far fewer occupational psychologists or business psychologists in learning and development than there are in all certainly encountered or mainstream l&d There lots of them acting, do learning and development roles like coaching, but in terms of working with main four main sort of workforce development, there are far fewer than that in that area than there are in than there are in selection. And I think, you know, by bringing our kind of measurement skills to learning and development, this
Richard Anderson 40:00
A huge amount that we can add to the process. Yeah, yeah, I quite agree. And it's only been, like I said, within your support and those with this, but but on evolve that, we've started to try and formalize and try and put something in place when it comes to learning and development, because I think that's something else as well. It's a little bit of a, I guess, a minefield, or it's a bit of a, it's a huge challenge as a small business owner, when you know, you have to do these things. But if you've never done it before, where do you where do you start? And I know that you're really passionate about small business and startups, and I think kind of applying these techniques to small businesses is as important as it is, for these, you know, large businesses with l&d functions and divisions.
Peter Pease 40:47
Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And, yeah, and I think that, you know, there's a, there's a kind of science that, that, that psychologists and, you know, kind of evidence based mentality that we can kind of bring that, that perhaps, you know, add something to, to what other learning and development professionals can bring, can bring as well. That's really interesting. So I know that you're also doing, and I'm keen for us to briefly discuss this, before we finish off the podcast, you're doing some other research or some ongoing research projects into this area, you happy to talk through what you're doing on that front? Yeah. So as I've kind of worn down from the university, and looked at measurement and evaluation within learning and development, I've ended up you know, talking to loads of people, I've been off to conferences and expos. And I kind of feel like, nobody's really got all the answers on that. So what we did back end of last year is we did a piece of research, quantitative research, with learning and development leaders in the UK, and North America, and Ireland. And we've got 350 people completed, completed that it accounts for more than 2 million employees worth of of learning responsibility.
Richard Anderson 42:18
And some kind of really interesting thoughts and conclusions from that. I know, we've discussed that we might kind of look at that in another episode. Yeah, absolutely. I'll be slightly running out of time now, but but there's some really interesting stuff coming coming out of that if you're if you're interested in how you, it's not just about measuring the impact of learning and development, but it's about how you can collect data from your learning and development, that then then helps you make better decisions so that you spend your learning and development pounds and dollars better in the future. sounds really interesting. We'll definitely do that. We'll get another podcast. And if you're hoping to join me, I've really enjoyed this one. So we'll definitely do another one.
And I guess just to just to run things up, Peter, in that case, if anybody wants to discuss any of these topics in a little more detail with yours, give our guests the chance to see where where people can contact you. I'll put I think as part of this podcast, we always put a blog post up there with a transcript. Are you happy for us to put your your link to LinkedIn on there?
Peter Pease 43:28
Yeah, no, that would be fine. Or and my email address as well very happy to talk to anybody kind of informally about about kind of learning and development type of type of type of matters. And I guess it wouldn't be right if I didn't finish off by you know, asking listeners a couple of questions. So so I just like you to think back on what you've just listened to. And ask yourself, What's one thing I've learned from this session? Secondly, what's one thing I might do differently as a result of listening to this session, you know, because I'm a teacher, and I can't help myself.
Richard Anderson 44:04
Brilliant, what a perfect way to end it. So Peter Pease, thanks ever so much. Really appreciate your time. And thanks for joining me on Psyched for Business. Thank you.
Voiceover 44:14
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