Reference no: EM132812220

Rebecca is an Executive Level 2 working in the HR branch of a medium-sized Australian Public Service agency which has policy and programme responsibilities. She is currently Director People Development and was promoted into the job after a three-year stint as a line manager in one of the agency's more prominent programme divisions.

As line manager, Rebecca made it a point to actively support her three teams in their professional development and paid much attention to building their technical capabilities as well as their skills in working well within and across teams. A teacher by background, she has always valued learning.

Part of her vision for her new role is to ensure that operational areas within the agency are well supported with a variety of business-related learning and development opportunities. These would provide practical help to people working with the many complexities of policy development and programme implementation. Learning and development in the agency, according to Rebecca, is supposed to be about practical skill development in areas relevant to the agency's core business.

While the branch has lead responsibility for many HR-related functions, processes and policies, the branch also works in close collaboration with two HR support cells that service two of the largest divisions in the agency.

These cells essentially provide operational support to divisional staff including personnel administration, recruitment, case management and co-ordinating learning and development activities in highly specialised technical areas.

The branch has a good reputation within the agency and most divisional heads have been appreciative and supportive of branch initiatives. Of late however, the branch has been under increasing pressure to get the agency's HRMIS in order so that it provides useful workforce performance reports for the executive, and to streamline its menu of learning and development activities.

Some division heads have also mentioned on more than one occasion, the need for the branch to demonstrate the returns that the agency's expensive middle-management programme is making on its investment. This programme is paid for by all the divisions based on their quota of participants. The larger divisions have felt the burden of having to invest more, given the higher proportion of their participants.

This pressure, together with the recent focus on learning and development evaluation by the Government and central APS agencies, has compelled the branch head to think about the need for an agency learning and development evaluation strategy. To ignore these pressures would be to risk divisional support and goodwill and the relevance of the learning and development function. Divisions would simply develop their own learning and development agendas if they felt their needs weren't being met by corporate HR.

As Director People Development, Rebecca has primary responsibility for the design, development and implementation of this strategy.

She knows that this is a daunting task. The agency runs over 30 learning and development activities including:

• competency certification courses
• postgraduate programmes in policy development
• 'study bank'-agency-approved time for formal study
• supervisor development programmes
• IT training
• E-learning for OH&S and diversity issues
• a middle management residential programme
• an action learning set in a policy area
• study visits of community stakeholder groups
• self-paced study manuals
• external attachments
• occasional lunchtime seminars
• basic APS procedural and administrative development programmes
• executive coaching services for the senior executives
• brokering external programmes.

Answer the following questions:

1. What can be done to begin developing the strategy?

2. What will be the key objectives of this strategy? What criteria can be used to determine which programmes will be evaluated?

3. What criteria can be used to help identify the level of evaluation that would be required?