Phase 1: Assessment

Define your vision and mission

Vision statement

Define what you want your training group (cadre) to accomplish through clear vision and mission statements.

A vision statement is an aspirational description of what you would like to achieve. It serves as a guide to choose current and future courses of action.

Your vision and mission statements will guide your decisions on forming the right cadre of people with the right focus.

Mission statement

A mission statement outlines your core purpose and focus. It explains how the organization will achieve the vision.

Assess the strength of your infrastructure

Infrastructure

Next, determine your current strengths and weaknesses. You can do this with a needs assessment, which will identify any gaps in your infrastructure.

Effective infrastructure involves:

• A culture of continuous learning that includes formal and informal professional development (PD).
• A focus on relevant content.
• Professional collaboration.

As you assess your infrastructure, key questions to answer might include:

• What is the need?
• What is missing?
• How will you bridge the gap between what is and what should be?

Use the How Strong Is Your Professional Development Infrastructure? form to do an assessment.

Answering questions in Most Important BUT Most Ignored Questions for Training Cadre Development can add clarity to your efforts.

Develop an evaluation strategy

Evaluation strategy

Next, it is important to determine a strategy for ensuring that your training cadre has been successful. Think through your evaluation strategy early in the process. This ensures you begin with the end in mind. The evaluation strategy will help guide your efforts and define what success looks like for your cadre and organization.

At this stage, you are only forming your evaluation strategy. You will perform the evaluation later.

A well-developed evaluation strategy will improve your sustainability efforts. With a clear strategy in place, you can:

• Determine the effects of your activities.
• Fine-tune areas that need improvement to reach your goals.

Begin by determining your evaluation measures. Consider:

• What key indicators will you measure to determine the success of your cadre?
• When and how often will you measure your performance?
• How will you measure your performance?

Know what to track

Develop a strategy that allows you to evaluate the impact of your training cadre:

• Are you reaching your intended audience?
• Do you need to make adjustments?
• Are adjustments putting you back on the right track?
• Are your resources being distributed wisely?
• Are you achieving the desired results?

Develop goals and objectives

Goals

Set specific goals that your training cadre should accomplish. Keep in mind: the framework of your vision and mission; the funding opportunities and other directives or priorities.

Ideally, you will set short- and long-term goals. Short-term goals help guide your focus and serve as milestones and progress checks along the way. Long-term goals specify what you wish to accomplish. Your training cadre's goals will likely evolve as funding opportunities arise or as you receive other directives.

Well-written goals help to:

• Establish the overall direction for and focus of your training cadre.
• Define the scope of what the cadre should achieve.
• Create a foundation for developing strategies and objectives.

There are two steps to writing good goals:

1. Specify an expected outcome.
2. Identify the target population to be affected.

Creating goals in this way can help you specify the objectives you want to accomplish.

Well-written goals

Well-written goals have these characteristics:

• Declarative of a program outcome.
• Jargon-free.
• Short and concise.
• Understandable.
• Positive.
• Framed as objectives that are stepping stones toward achieving goals.

Objectives

Objectives are statements that describe the intended result and are the basis for the following:

• Monitoring progress toward goals.
• Setting targets for accountability.

Objectives are useful only when they are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

SMART objectives

What makes an objective SMART?

• Specific
  • Specific objectives provide the who (target population) and what (action and activity) of activities.
  • A specific objective uses only one action verb.
• Measurable
  • Measurable objectives indicate how much change is expected.
  • A measurable objective makes it possible to count or document change to know whether the objective has been achieved.
• Achievable
  • Achievable objectives can be accomplished with your program's existing resources and constraints.
  • An achievable objective is attainable within a given time frame.
• Realistic
  • Realistic objectives address the scope of the problem and propose reasonable solutions.
  • A realistic objective directly relates to the goal.
• Time-Bound
  • Time-bound objectives provide a time frame indicating when an objective will be met.
  • A time-bound objective states when the objective should be measured.

Resources

• Criteria to Assess Five-Year Goals
• Data Collection Framework
• Data Collection Methods: Pros and Cons
• Examples of Clear and Unclear Goals
• How Strong Is Your Professional Development Infrastructure?
• Improving Professional Development Offerings: Steps to Conduct a Needs Assessment
• Most Important BUT Most Ignored Questions for Training Cadre Development
• Sample Vision, Mission, and Goal Statements