Section Six
members of top management may actually hope
for such systematic evaluation, their reward
systems continue to reward ignorance in
this area.^44There is probably a great deal of truth in Kerr’s comments
even today. Scott Tannenbaum and Steven Woods suggest that
with expensive training programs, strong forms of evaluation
are some-times unlikely because of personal risk to the
proponent of the program, in the event of failure. The
alternative in such cases is a trade-off of risk for a weaker form
of evaluation, such as participants’ reactions or satisfaction with
the program.^45
However, as noted earlier, because of international
competition and increased focus on costs, human resource
programs have been subjected to greater scrutiny.
Consequently, human resource managers have had to become
more sophisticated in justifying their programs because the
costs of investments in training can be substantial. For
example, during one year training costs for IBM and were more
than $2 billion.^46 Thus, conducting credible evaluations of
training effectiveness should be more important in the future.