Allan is a leading measurement and evaluation professional. As Co-Director of the three-year, Investing in People project, he helped design and execute one of the most authoritative and extensive evaluations of the ROI of investing in workplace learning.

Allan provides a unique range of business impact evaluation services for clients in business, media, education and corporate training. A central professional focus over the past ten years has been to help organizations in the private and public sectors adapt their learning and talent development activities to leverage innovations in learning theory, technologies and Internet-based learning solutions.

Allan is also well known in the learning fields for his national workshops, seminars, and briefings on a variety of themes related to evaluating workplace learning. He is frequent speaker presenting to a range of organizations including: the Conference Board of Canada, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters (EME), Human Resources Professional Association (HRPA), Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD), Harvard Business School, the Canada School of Public Service, and the Canada Revenue Agency.  

In partnership with Dr. Lynette Gillis, Allan contributed to such landmark innovations in evaluation as the Quality Standards for Evaluating Multimedia and Online Learning (McGraw Hill 2000) and the more recent innovation in evaluation thinking, the Learning Value Chain^TM (LVC) framework. This new evaluation paradigm gives learning organizations more powerful and easy-to-use tools to evaluate the impact of their learning programs. Borrowing from the thinking of Harvard’s Michael Porter, the LCV approach seeks to better help organizations monitor learning outcomes along a chain of impact and maximize organizational and business results (Porter’s ‘Competitive Advantage’).

Building on the demonstrated effectiveness of the LVC model, Allan and Dr. Gillis have developed for CFLI the High Impact Evaluationmodel and toolset that gives clients a powerful new process and instruments to monitor, manage, and improve performance outcomes and the business impact of their workplace learning and talent development programs.

Allan also authored the comprehensive research report, Connecting the Dots… Linking Training Outcomes to Business Outcomes and the Economy (2007), commissioned by the Canadian Council on Learning. Drawing on global econometric research and the existing body of case study evidence, Connecting the Dots for the first time gave private and public sector policy and decision makers convincing evidence that investing in workplace learning is not just ‘a nice thing to do’. The preponderance of international evidence indicates convincingly that increased investment in “training and skills development can have substantial payoffs for individual organizations, as well as regional and national economies.”

Allan helps organizations adopt their training environments to the new learning technologies. Working with senior organizations as diverse as CIBC, Petro Canada, Manulife, Toronto Stock Exchange, Bell Canada, Nortel Networks, RBC, Rogers Canada, and the Ontario Securities Commission, he develops high-impact enterprise learning strategies, business cases, needs assessments, and custom elearning courseware to help such organizations meet their performance improvement objectives and business goals.

Allan has played a leading role in workplace learning projects that have earned Centre for Learning Impact prestigious international awards: the Canadian Society for Training and Development2004 Award for ‘Canadian Training Excellence; the 2003 American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) Excellence in Practice Award and the 2002 Conference Board of Canada’s National Award for Learning Technologies in the Workplace. Allan also contributed to the development and writing of the world’s first quality standards for evaluating and developing multimedia learning materials: Quality Standards for Evaluating Multimedia and Online Training(McGraw-Hill 2000).

 Allan is a graduate of the University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (Mechanical Engineering).