Case Study
How WestEd aligned L&D to business strategy with a one-page plan
- 03 Mar, 2026
- 8 min read
In this case study
Table of Contents
"WeLearn's SOAP and Learning Strategy Scorecard have really made a big difference in communicating with the team the work for the year." — Gretchen Weber, Vice President, Learning & Development, WestEd
Organization: WestEd | Industry: Education Research & Services | Employees: ~1,000 | L&D function established: 2023
WestEd’s learning and development function is less than three years old. In that time, a four-person team has moved from standing up basic infrastructure to operating against a documented strategy with structured measurement and direct alignment to organizational goals.
The shift accelerated in late 2025, when the team adopted WeLearn’s Strategy on a Page (SOAP) framework and completed the Learning Strategy Scorecard. Together, these tools gave L&D a shared reference point for planning, a diagnostic view of maturity gaps, and a format for executive reporting that changed how leadership engaged with the function.
About WestEd
WestEd is a national nonpartisan, nonprofit research, development, and service agency headquartered in San Francisco. Founded in 1966, the organization works across education, health, justice, policy, labor, and child welfare to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults.
The scope is broad. WestEd partners with school districts, state education agencies, and federal entities including the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Justice. It conducts research, delivers technical assistance, and translates policy into practice across all 50 states. The organization runs federally funded research and development centers, builds evidence-based tools for practitioners, and advises on everything from early childhood development to workforce readiness. With 16 offices nationwide and a staff where more than half hold advanced degrees, WestEd operates at the intersection of research and real-world application.
In 2023, WestEd created a formal learning and development department and partnered it with HR to build out the talent function. The mandate: establish L&D from scratch for a research-driven organization, the kind of workforce that expects evidence behind every decision, including decisions about how they learn.
The challenge
A new function without a strategic framework
By 2025, WestEd’s L&D team had built solid programming and delivered results for two years. But the function lacked a unifying strategy. Priorities weren’t clearly articulated. The team operated reactively, taking on requests as they came rather than filtering them against defined goals.
“We have a tendency to bite off more than we can chew. We say yes to lots of things. We’re a small team with limited capacity, and we didn’t have a way to filter what we took on.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
Data collection was already in place. The team produced annual reports and employee-facing summaries. But the reporting followed activities rather than shaping them: a recap of participation and satisfaction, not measurement of impact tied to what the organization needed most.
That gap showed up in executive conversations. L&D could demonstrate effort and output. It couldn’t yet demonstrate strategic value in the terms leadership used to evaluate other functions.
The approach
Strategy on a Page: four priorities, not fourteen
The team adopted WeLearn’s Strategy on a Page (SOAP) framework to compress its strategy into a single view: the function’s identity, guiding principles, and the initiatives that connect L&D to organizational goals.
The SOAP requires four strategic focus points. That constraint forced decisions the team had been deferring. What to prioritize. What to stop doing. How each initiative tied back to WestEd’s business needs.
“Taking those templates helped bring so much clarity. We distilled everything into four strategic priorities and the initiatives underneath them. It helps us stay focused in ways we haven’t been in the last couple of years.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
The result was a strategy the entire team could reference in one place, with a visible connection from each initiative to the business.
Learning Strategy Scorecard: diagnosing maturity gaps
Alongside the SOAP, the team completed WeLearn’s Learning Strategy Scorecard, a self-assessment measuring maturity across six dimensions of L&D strategy. For a function built from scratch in under three years, the diagnostic served as both a progress check and a roadmap.
“I loved the strategy scorecard because it made me realize how far we’d come in two years and how far we have to go.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
The scorecard directed action. The team mapped its lowest-scoring dimensions to initiatives in the SOAP. Where the assessment revealed weakness, the strategy now contained a plan.
Learning governance was the clearest example. The function scored lowest there and built governance directly into the SOAP as a strategic initiative. That work is now underway: formal partnerships with four internal centers that represent WestEd’s core programmatic and client-facing work, creating a foundation for shared learning priorities and structured decision-making.
“The scorecard said we have a low score on governance. Best practice tells you we should focus there. We’re a research-based organization, so we put something on governance in the SOAP to get us started.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
Impact
Executive alignment
The SOAP gave L&D a format for presenting its work in terms leadership already uses: priorities, targets, alignment to organizational goals. Conversations with WestEd’s senior leadership shifted from reporting on activity to discussing strategic value.
“I shared the SOAP with my CTO and CEO; with both I had a focused and clear conversation about L&D’s strategic value in 2026.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
The Chief Talent Officer now has a single reference point for L&D’s priorities and can communicate them directly to senior leadership. The annual executive summary, previously a list of completed activities, now follows the structure of the SOAP: organized around priorities, with measurement tied to each.
“In comparison to previous years, the report used to be all over the place — here’s all the activities we did. Now it has clear and structured alignment to priorities: what we want to measure, how, and results.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
Broader adoption across the talent function
WestEd’s talent function operates across three pillars: L&D, HR, and Employee Experience, each led by a Vice President. After seeing the SOAP in practice, the VP leading Employee Experience adopted the framework for her own team’s annual planning.
“The head of Employee Experience liked the SOAP so much she adopted it for her team, modeled after ours. It’s having an impact on other strategic parts of the business.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
The framework solved a planning and communication problem that extended well beyond L&D. Its structure translates across functions because the underlying challenge is the same: how to compress strategy into something a team can act on and leadership can evaluate.
Clearer accountability and operational focus
The SOAP restructured how the team operates day to day. Monthly meetings now anchor to the four strategic priorities. Individual team members own specific priorities and the initiatives within them, replacing loosely shared responsibilities with defined accountability.
“The SOAP has been well received by the L&D team members and the CTO. I’m using it to structure the monthly L&D team meetings, and it helped really clarify some roles and responsibilities. For example, one team member is leading one of our strategic priorities and the three major initiatives within that.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
For a four-person team supporting roughly 1,000 staff, that matters. Limited capacity demands that every effort connects to a priority. The SOAP provides the filter.
From activity metrics to impact measurement
With priorities defined, the team built what they call an L&D Value Measurement Framework, a structured approach to tracking impact at three levels for each strategic priority.
Level 1: Engagement and reach. Participation rates, time spent, how broadly the work reaches across the organization.
Level 2: Capability change. Self-reported shifts in capability, supplemented where possible by feedback from the people participants manage.
Level 3: Business impact. Employee engagement, staff retention, project health. The outcomes that tie learning to organizational performance.
The framework maps to the SOAP. Each priority carries its own measures across all three levels. For “building leadership capacity,” Level 1 tracks program participation, Level 2 captures whether managers report improved capabilities, and Level 3 examines retention and engagement among the people those managers lead.
“We wanted to get beyond what we were already collecting – activity data, who showed up, who liked it – to impact metrics.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
The team is also building a dashboard to consolidate data from different learning experiences, making it possible to spot patterns across the organization and bring that information into governance and leadership conversations.
Isolating the causal link between training and business outcomes remains difficult. The team is candid about that. But the framework moves the function from activity reporting toward impact measurement, even where the data starts as self-reported.
“You’re two to three steps away from really knowing the impact in a clean way. We’d be satisfied with self-report data there, tying whether people did better at their jobs.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
What's next
WestEd’s L&D function is focused on two priorities over the next twelve months, both tied to the SOAP.
Infrastructure and visibility. Many staff across WestEd still don’t know what L&D offers or how to access it. Initiatives in the SOAP address this directly: consolidating learning into a single catalog, ensuring compliance and professional development are tracked in one place, and making the analytics dashboard operational so the team can surface patterns and report to center leadership teams in close to real time.
Strategic partnerships with leaders. The goal is to shift the relationship between L&D and business leaders from reactive, one-off requests to a regular rhythm of strategic partnership. The governance work now underway lays the foundation: formal relationships with WestEd’s four centers, built around shared priorities and joint decision-making.
“In twelve months, I want us further embedded into the infrastructure. More staff aware of what we offer. More regular participants and users. And our partnerships with leaders more strategic, less reactive.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
Advice for learning leaders
Asked what she would tell a peer struggling to position L&D as more than a cost center, Weber’s advice is direct: start with the business, not with learning.
“The story you communicate about your value, you have to connect it to organizational goals and KPIs. Line up under that and you’ll demonstrate value. My advice is to figure out what a day in the life is for the people in your business. That’s where there’s a big disconnect. Partner with subject matter experts in the business.”
— Gretchen Weber, VP, Learning & Development, WestEd
Weber’s own background on the program side of the business, years spent scoping projects, managing budgets, and working directly with clients before moving into L&D, informs that perspective. The principle holds regardless: understand how the organization operates, speak its language, and connect learning to the outcomes leadership tracks.
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