When money is tight, training is often the first casualty of corporate cutbacks as budget decision-makers struggle to see a direct link between the cost of training and improvements in employee performance. A method of measuring how training room learning transfers to the shop floor might help, and NUI Maynooth's principal investigator in the school of business, Paul Donovan, has developed one.

Donovan's method is called Star (System of Training Transfer Assessment Report) and it is a web-based tool that enables organisations to "identify the critical factors that cause transfer of training from course to job", says Donovan who has set up spinout company Trinsights to develop and sell the product.

“Existing approaches measure the impact post-factum. Our approach allows the prediction of training success. At the moment 90 per cent of workplace training is wasted because the taught skills do not get transferred back in a way that effectively yields return on investment. Star works out the return and tells companies how to transfer their training more effectively into the workplace.”

The product will be launched in the autumn and will be sold through channel partners such as industry and sector associations and global management practices. Donovan expects Trinsights to employ 10 people in the medium term. Customers will pay a licence fee to use the basic system and can pay for an upgrade if they want to mine the data for further insights. The company is working with a number of beta clients in the social media, industrial and transport sectors.

Donovan has brought over 30 years' experience to bear on the design of his product. Prior to joining NUI Maynooth he was head of management development at the Irish Management Institute. Before that, he was general operations manager with Bord na Móna and is co-founder of the Master Trainer Institute in Geneva.

“Organisations do not have certainty about what they’re going to get for their investment in training. As a result there is often a lot of criticism of human resource development and its value,” Donovan says. “I spent 20 years delivering management development programmes and could clearly see that although programmes might be well designed and delivered, there were many occasions where the intended impact back on the job did not occur. I subsequently became very interested in the ‘why?’”

Donovan's system is aimed at large organisations (payroll of 1,000 or more) and employees' contact with the system is short and easy – they answer a brief, anonymous online questionnaire once their training is complete. "We then perform regression analysis on the data to identify the two or three factors that are making the real difference to the transfer of learning," Donovan says. "Other providers in the marketplace offer elements of these outputs, but we offer the full package using our own software to make data capture and analysis time- and cost-effective. In the past, this type of exercise was typically paper based. I saw how the right software could take the heavy lifting out of the data capture and analysis and developed the system while preparing for my doctorate. I worked with 12 companies to develop and validate the approach. For me the big cost was my time. Enterprise Ireland provided €300,000 in funding for feasibility studies and to build the system."

Donovan says there is considerable potential to develop the system further. “We are planning to carry out ongoing benchmarking analyses for individual sectors and expect that companies will want to purchase results about their relative performance in training transfer effectiveness.”