At the conclusion of his survey of twelve Quebec firms considered to be high performers in ALT by the sectoral committee (CSMO) representing them, Dunberry (2006) found that "there are practices for the evaluation of formal and informal training in all of the high-performing companies surveyed", but "these practices are designed first and foremost to ensure that education and training contributes to a quantitative and qualitative improvement in production and services" (Dunberry, 2006, p. 35; transl.). Practices for evaluating training at levels 4 and 5 are uncommon, but virtually all these companies make it a systematic practice to evaluate their ALT activities, and these evaluations focus primarily on determining the level of satisfaction and what has been learned and then, to a lesser extent, behaviour on the job following training. The distribution of evaluation practices in these 12 companies among the different levels in Figure 4.1 is similar to that noted above (Lapierre et al., 2005) for all Quebec firms, although they are used more frequently.

In the companies studied by Bélanger et al. (2004), detailed evaluation of the activity covering all four levels is also rare, with only one company having done this in only one of its programs. This was a biopharmaceutical organization and it had a university research centre conduct a four-level evaluation of its new approach to mentoring. The long-term goal was to evaluate the impact of new programs on management restructuring and renewal that was under way at the time and thus to determine the benefits of this major investment. Interviews with immediate superiors, mentors and mentorees were the immediate sources of information for this evaluation of the new program. We should also note the practice in some retail businesses of evaluating the training of salespersons with respect to quality of service (Bélanger et al., 2004). The need to ensure that the salespersons are putting into practice their expanded new role and acquiring the new qualification is linked to the company's need to gain a leg up in a very competitive market.

In short, we find very little evaluation of (a) the impact of education and training on the organization, and (b) its financial performance, and there is also very little formal integration of the evaluation data at the various levels. Also, formal evaluation practices make only a limited contribution to guiding the ALT policy and consequently they do not help to advance the recognition of its contribution in the overall strategy of the organization.

That systematic efforts to evaluate education and training in organizations in Quebec are still limited should come as no surprise. Kirkpatrick found that while evaluation and monitoring of the results are common practices in businesses in the areas of production and sales, such practices are much less common in the area of ALT. Often marked by a philanthropic approach or a normative vision, ^{Footnote 62} ALT is too easily assumed to produce positive results in and of itself.

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