When Assess is your weakest stage

Your people are practising, but partly in the dark. They act, and then nothing tells them how close they came to good — at least not while it still matters.

What a low score usually means

Feedback exists, but it arrives too late and too vague to act on. A satisfaction survey the same afternoon, a manager conversation three weeks later, a completion percentage on a dashboard. None of these close the loop, because by the time they land, the learner can no longer feel the connection between the decision they made and the outcome it produced.

There's a second, quieter cost. Practice without feedback doesn't just fail to help — it actively embeds whatever the person did, correct or not. Repetition makes habits durable regardless of whether they're the right habits.

The underlying cause

Most organisations measure learning in order to report it, not to improve it. Completion rates and satisfaction scores answer a governance question. They tell the learner nothing they can use. The two purposes need different instruments, and the reporting one usually wins the budget.

What good looks like

→Feedback arrives while the attempt is still warm — ideally within the same activity.

→It is specific enough to act on: not a score, but a visible gap between what was done and what works.

→You measure whether behaviour changed on the job — not just reactions and quiz results.

→Learners can self-diagnose. They know where they went wrong without being told each time.

Three moves this quarter

Move one feedback point earlier

Find the longest gap in your current design between a learner acting and finding out how it went. Close it. Even shifting feedback from "next session" to "next ten minutes" changes what the learner can do with it.

Add one behavioural measure

Pick a single programme and add one observable on-the-job measure — a manager check-in on a specific behaviour at 30 days, a sample of real work reviewed against a standard. One measure that means something beats a dashboard of measures that don't.

Stop reporting satisfaction as effectiveness

Keep collecting it if governance requires it, but stop presenting it as evidence the learning worked. It measures whether people enjoyed the experience. Separating the two, publicly, changes the conversation you have with your stakeholders about what to fund next.

A note on decay. Research on training transfer has found behaviour change dropping sharply over the year following a programme — in one widely cited study, from around 62% to 34%. Assessment that only happens at the end of a programme will never see this. Measuring at 30 and 90 days tells you a different, more useful story.

The LEAP Diagnostic · GlassRoom Performance Architectureglassroom.in