A recent business page headline from London's Daily Telegraph read, "Training Falls Down on the Job" (October 27, 1997, p. 31). This report was based on a study of business leaders. The popular perception that HRD costs organizations more than it returns in benefits has haunted the HRD profession since its inception. And not being able to change this perception is its Achilles heel. Although organizations are more than economic entities, they are nonetheless economic entities. Any organization that remains alive will ultimately judge each of its components from a return-on-investment (ROI) framework and it will do so with or without valid data.
To face this challenge, four views of HRD have been presented: (1) a major business process, something an organization must do to succeed; (2) a valueadded activity, something that is potentially worth doing; (3) an optional activity, something that is nice to do; and (4) a waste of business resources, something that has costs exceeding the benefits (Swanson, 1995).
The dominant view of HRD falls within the third and fourth options, with HRD being perceived as an optional activity or having costs greater than benefits. The simple idea that HRD is not a good investment is popular and entrenched. Economist Paul Krugman (1994) informs us of the dangers of pop economics and that simple ideas-right or wrong-have staylng power.
A recent study by ASTD, the profession's largest practitioner organization, reports that in terms of actual evaluation of HRD programs in the field, "3 percent are evaluated for financial impact" (Bassi, Benson, and Cheney, 1996, p. 11). The irony is that ASTD has been the chief advocate of the profession's most widely endorsed evaluation scheme, Donald Kirkpatricks simple, yet flawed and impotent, four-level evaluation model (Alliger and Janak, 1989;Holton, 1996). Even Krkpatricks recent best-selling book is devoid of any elementary economic or psychometric theory (see Kirkpatrick, 1994).