Five guiding principles to help to improve diversity - training assessment

Introduction Diversity training (DT) is currently the main diversity-management tool in organizations. A recent survey of individuals in UK organizations charged with diversity-management responsibilities found that 94 per cent of respondents said their organization employed DT awareness training, and 77 per cent mentioned offering manager DT (CIPD, 2006). With our combined experience as both academics and DT practitioners, we have previously reported how little mainstream social science and management theory and research finds its way into the development of DT programmes (Pendry et al., 2007). In the present article, we turn our attention to the topic of putting DT assessment into practice. In simple terms, when and how can practitioners incorporate what we know from the social-science and management literatures to better assess the effects of DT?