The Kirkpatrick Podcast

In this episode of The Kirkpatrick Podcast, Vanessa sits down in person with Jawad Ahmed, a longtime Kirkpatrick Partners affiliate and director at C2C in India, for a candid conversation about how the Kirkpatrick Model travels — and sometimes gets lost — across borders. Jawad shares what changed for him the moment he was certified in 2015, the myth he hears most often from HR and L&D professional...

Most organizations are confident they have data. Loads of it. But in this episode of the Kirkpatrick Podcast, Vanessa sits down with psychometrician and data-analytics professor Dr. Anna Lissitz to ask the uncomfortable question: is it the right data — and is it telling you the truth? Anna, who wrote the triangulation chapter in Building a Culture of Evaluation, makes the case that a single metric...

Everyone says they're behind on AI. According to Myra Roldan, Chief AI Officer of UnDesto AI, if everyone's behind, then no one really is — and that hype is costing organizations real money. In this episode, Vanessa sits down with Myra, a 15+-year AI veteran, framework builder, and contributor to Vanessa's upcoming book, for a refreshingly honest conversation about what AI can and can't do for the...

Ask executives whether they act on the feedback they get from employees, and 85 to 95% will say absolutely. Ask the frontline the same question, and the score drops by 30 to 50 points. That gap is the heart of this episode. Vanessa sits down with Dr. Benjamin Granger, Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics, a contributor to her book Building a Culture of Evaluation and author of A Leader Worth...

In this episode of The Kirkpatrick Podcast, Vanessa sits down with Ted Kniker — co-founder of IMPACT Paradigm Associates, former Chief of Evaluation at the U.S. Department of State, and contributing author to Raising America: Building a More Perfect Union — to tackle one of the most pressing questions in evaluation today: how do you actually scale it across an entire organization?   Ted brings har...

In this episode of the Kirkpatrick Podcast, Vanessa Milara Alzate makes a bold claim: your evaluation efforts aren't failing because of your model, your data, or your people. They're failing because of your system. Vanessa reframes the perennial conversation around leadership alignment and evaluation by shifting the focus to system alignment — the processes, tools, incentives, reporting structures...

AI is forcing a difficult but necessary question for learning and development leaders: if knowledge is now instant, searchable, and increasingly automated, where does L&D create value? For years, many organizations built learning systems around access to information, course completion, and content delivery. That model made sense when knowledge was harder to distribute and change moved more slowly....

Most organizations say they want better measurement. They invest in tools, dashboards, and surveys. They ask their L&D teams to prove impact. And yet, nothing really changes. Programs still get evaluated based on completion rates and satisfaction scores. Decisions are still made without clear evidence of behavior change or business impact. And L&D teams remain stuck trying to "prove value" instead...

Most organizations do not have an evaluation problem. They have an ownership problem. Evaluation often begins with one committed L&D leader, analyst, or internal champion who asks better questions, pushes for stronger data, and tries to connect learning to performance. That effort matters, but it does not scale. When evaluation lives with a few motivated people instead of with leadership, it becom...

Many organizations say they value evaluation. What they often mean is that they send surveys, track completion, and produce dashboards. That may create visibility, but it rarely creates better decisions. And when data collection becomes a substitute for performance thinking, evaluation turns into compliance theater rather than a business capability. That is the tension at the center of this episod...

Most organizations don't have an innovation problem. They have a clarity problem. Leaders push for speed. Teams launch new initiatives. Metrics are reported. Dashboards fill up. And yet, one critical question remains unanswered: What is actually working—and why? In today's environment, organizations are under constant pressure to move faster, do more, and innovate continuously. But without a syste...

Most organizations believe evaluation fails because they don't have the right tools, data, or capability. But the real failure point is much higher. Evaluation breaks when leaders continue to treat it as reporting instead of using it to guide decisions. In many organizations, evaluation starts strong. Learning teams ask better questions. Data is collected. Reports are created. But over time, the i...

Too many organizations say they want better evaluation, stronger learning impact, and clearer evidence of business value. Then they make one critical mistake: they assign the work to a single motivated person and hope that individual effort will somehow create enterprise-wide change. That approach rarely works. Evaluation does not fail because teams lack commitment. It fails because organizations...

Organizations rarely struggle because they lack data. They struggle because the data they have cannot tell a coherent story. Across large enterprises, teams measure success in different ways. One department tracks engagement, another measures efficiency, another focuses on operational output. Each team's metrics may be valid within its own context, yet when leaders try to interpret the organizatio...

Most organizations believe they have a culture of evaluation. They run surveys. They build dashboards. They report metrics. And yet performance stays flat. In this episode, we challenge a dangerous misconception: measurement volume is not the same as evaluation maturity. In fact, constant measurement without learning creates fatigue, defensiveness, and performative reporting. A true culture of eva...

For decades, organizations have used the Kirkpatrick Model to evaluate training. And for decades, many have misunderstood what it was actually designed to do. We measured reaction surveys. We tracked completions. We reported learning scores. But somewhere along the way, evaluation became an after-the-fact reporting exercise instead of a strategic performance lens. The model became smaller than its...

Most learning leaders think they're asking the right question. "Did it work?" It sounds accountable. Efficient. Executive-ready. But this single question may be the very thing preventing your organization from improving performance. Binary questions create binary answers. Yes or no. Pass or fail. Keep it or cut it. But performance doesn't behave like a light switch. It behaves like a system. When...

Most organizations believe they evaluate training. In reality, they document it—after it's already too late to matter. One of the biggest misconceptions we see is the belief that evaluation happens after training. Post-program surveys, completion reports, and dashboards are treated as proof of value. But by the time those data points appear, the most important decisions have already been made: goa...

For decades, many organizations have believed they were "doing Kirkpatrick." In reality, they were completing forms. In this episode, we challenge one of the most persistent misconceptions in learning and performance: that the Kirkpatrick Model is a linear, post-training evaluation checklist. That version of the model may be familiar, but it was never the intent. And more importantly, it limits th...

Pressure doesn't create failure. It reveals it. In this episode of The Kirkpatrick Podcast, we explore a leadership truth many organizations avoid: when performance breaks down under pressure, the root cause is almost never motivation or intent—it's preparation, practice, and the absence of meaningful evaluation. Our conversation with Ray Resendez, Senior VP of Government Solutions at ELB Learning...

Financial ROI has long been the gold standard of proving learning impact—but what if the most meaningful results can't be captured in a spreadsheet? In this episode of The Kirkpatrick Podcast , Vanessa Alzate and Dr. Amy Heaton explore how to move beyond traditional ROI calculations to measure what truly matters: the human, behavioral, and cultural outcomes that shape real performance. Most ROI fr...

Most organizations can tell you exactly how many people attended training, how many completed it, and how satisfied they felt afterward. What they can't tell you—at least not with confidence—is whether any of it actually changed performance. And that's not a data problem. It's a leadership problem. In this episode, I challenge one of the most deeply embedded habits in learning and development: mea...

Welcome to Season 5 of The Kirkpatrick Podcast! In this episode, Vanessa Alzate opens 2026 with a bold truth: We're not suffering from a lack of data—we're suffering from a lack of sense-making. We've never had more dashboards, analytics, and reports than we do today. Yet many organizations are less confident than ever about what's really driving performance. Vanessa unpacks why more measurement d...

Some leadership years don't look successful on LinkedIn. They don't come with celebratory posts, impressive metrics, or obvious wins. But those are often the years that matter most. In this reflective, end-of-season episode of the Kirkpatrick Podcast, Vanessa Alzate shares why 2025 was intentionally a catalyst year for Kirkpatrick Partners — a year focused on preparation, alignment, and invisible...

What does it really look like to buy a legacy brand, reinvent it, and lead it boldly into the future—without being born into the name? In this deeply honest episode, I (Vanessa) hand the hosting mic over to Dr. Amy Heaton and open up about the real story behind stepping into the Kirkpatrick legacy—imposter syndrome, missteps, reinvention, and the evolution of who we are becoming as Kirkpatrick Par...