Case Study
How CIS sharpened L&D's business alignment with the Strategy Scorecard
- 02 Jun, 2026
- 8 min read
In this case study
Table of Contents
"It was nice to go back to the fundamentals. Here's what makes a learning organization great. What are we doing well? How are we doing in these areas?"
We caught up recently with Jennifer Myers, Senior Director of Learning and Development at the Center for Internet Security (CIS), to talk about how her four-person team has been thinking about its work and what shifted for them over the past few months. Jennifer came to L&D from HR. She’d been Director of Human Resources at CIS before taking on the work of building the L&D function from scratch about five years ago. She’s the kind of leader who keeps asking what could be done better, even when the function is performing well.
By any external measure, the function Jennifer built has hit its stride. The annual report showed 28,000 training hours the prior year, 23 new critical-skill programs launched, and a 2024 Top Workplaces Award for professional development. Five years in, Jennifer wanted a structured way to take the next look at the function: where could it go from here, and what would it take to get there?
About CIS
CIS is a nonpartisan cybersecurity nonprofit. Its mission is to help public and private organizations safeguard against cyber threats, supported by a global network of volunteer experts. The workforce is highly technical, and L&D relies on internal subject-matter experts across engineering, security, and operations to co-create content. Recent shifts in how CIS serves its members are reshaping how those members engage with formal training, putting fresh pressure on L&D to deliver value in different ways.
The challenge
A high-performing function asking the next set of questions
Five years of building had given the team momentum and visible wins, with programs running, learners engaging, and dashboards tracking the activity. What Jennifer wanted was a structured moment to step back from the delivery rhythm and look at the function as a whole. She’d been operating heads-down for too long, as she described it, and was ready for a stretch of operating head-up.
“We were just heads-down. Let’s just do what we can the best way possible. We didn’t take a step back and ask ourselves: is there a better way?”
— Jennifer Myers
Telling the story externally
Alongside the maturity question, Jennifer was thinking about how L&D was telling its story to the rest of the business. Inside the team, everyone could see the value the work was creating. Bringing that story to senior leadership in their own language, connecting it to business priorities they could act on, was the piece Jennifer wanted to strengthen this year.
“We weren’t always making it visible to the business and connecting what we do to business priorities. We need to get better at telling the story of how we provide value.”
— Jennifer Myers
The approach
A team-level diagnostic
In November 2025, all four members of Jennifer’s L&D team completed WeLearn’s Learning Strategy Scorecard. It’s a 30-question self-assessment across six dimensions: alignment, governance, technology, content, measurement, and culture. WeLearn analyzed the responses, looking at where the team’s perceptions of its own function lined up and where they diverged. The diverging answers tend to be where the most useful insights live, since they expose the operational habits a team has built up over time without writing them down.
The picture WeLearn brought back to Jennifer was specific. CIS’s L&D function was strategically unified and operationally uneven, with a shared sense of purpose and different interpretations of how the function ran day to day. The widest spreads sat in governance and technology.
What the diagnostic surfaced
The strengths sat where Jennifer expected. Culture, measurement, and content scored highest across the team, reflecting years of investment in critical skills, the 575 employee development goals tied to those skills, and a reporting cadence that had become a real maturity signal for the function.
Governance was the dimension where the team’s scores diverged most widely. Decision rights, ownership, and accountability cadence existed informally inside the team. Each member had built their own working understanding of how things ran, and those understandings didn’t always match. Technology showed a similar pattern, with system access, dashboard visibility, and shared roadmaps all coming up as places where the team’s perceptions hadn’t aligned.
The governance finding mirrored an internal observation Jennifer had been sitting with. The team’s process for conducting learning needs analysis varied depending on who was running the conversation.
“It varied depending on who was leading the discussion, who was in the discussion, who spoke the loudest. The fix was standardization, so the data we collect is consistent and we can build trend analysis.”
— Jennifer Myers
Hearing the same observation come back through the Scorecard’s structured analysis made the case for action concrete. The learning needs analysis was one specific instance of a wider pattern: governance practices that no one had written down, so they varied with the person running them.
The roadmap WeLearn delivered
The Scorecard engagement included a working session where WeLearn walked Jennifer’s team through the results, placed CIS on the maturity ladder (Operational, with a clear path to Managed), and handed over a six-week alignment roadmap covering governance calibration, technology review, definition alignment, and reassessment. The framing came with the diagnosis: celebrate the team’s culture and measurement progress while focusing improvement on governance. The team got a clear, balanced agenda to work from.
Strategy on a Page: turning insights into 2026 priorities
With the diagnostic in hand, the team moved into SOAP work for 2026. Jennifer met with 30 to 40 leaders across the organization over two to three weeks, including initiative leads and heads of function. Five questions framed every conversation: what skill gaps are you seeing, what’s needed for future success, what’s working, what isn’t, what barriers do teams face when they try to learn?
Trends rolled into themes that went to senior leadership for consensus, and each priority then went to a team member who owned it through the year. Where the Scorecard had surfaced gaps, those gaps shaped which priorities made the page.
“It happened in really good time. We could put those enhancements right into our 2026 strategy. We didn’t have time to lose the learnings from the process.”
— Jennifer Myers
Why the order matters
Jennifer’s recommendation to peers running the same exercise is to do the Scorecard first and the SOAP after. The diagnostic gives the strategy something to work with. That order also keeps the insights warm, applied to the next planning cycle while they’re still fresh in the team’s thinking.
Impact
A specific governance fix already underway
The team standardized learning needs analysis first, with the same questions across functions, a consistent cadence, and defined participants. The data those conversations produce is now trendable, feeding directly into 2026 strategy decisions and closing a loop the team didn’t have before.
Leaders pulling L&D in earlier
Business leaders started inviting the team into their planning earlier. The shift came from a small habit Jennifer’s team built into its work. They began running proactive meet-and-greets with business leaders at the start of their planning cycles, with one simple framing: keep us in mind if you need help on X, Y, or Z.
“More often than not, they’re pulling us in. They’ll say: hey, why didn’t I think the L&D team could help on this?”
— Jennifer Myers
A team that operates around shared priorities
The SOAP gives the four-person team a common reference point. Each member owns a defined set of priorities, and monthly L&D meetings now anchor against the strategy. For a four-person team supporting an organization of CIS’s complexity, that kind of filter is what makes focused work possible.
What's next
Building KPIs that measure impact
The next stretch of work is moving from activity metrics like PD hours, program counts, and platform engagement to outcome metrics. Jennifer is candid that the team is in the middle of this. Building KPIs that connect learning to outcomes leadership cares about isn’t a clean exercise.
“Many learning challenges can’t be solved by L&D alone. They require leadership visibility, ownership, advocacy. We have to do more than present the data. We have to connect the dots to the outcomes leaders care about.”
— Jennifer Myers
From delivering learning to developing talent
The longer-horizon ambition Jennifer named was a shift in scope: from delivering learning to developing talent.
“We can create all the learning we want, but without the mechanism to actually engage with employees and have them apply the learning in their role, receive coaching, receive mentorship, we’ll hit a wall.”
— Jennifer Myers
Talent development sits at the system level: coaching, mentorship, the structures that turn learning into applied behavior. It’s a wider remit than L&D has traditionally held, and where Jennifer wants the team’s focus to land next.
Advice for learning leaders
Asked what she’d tell a peer struggling to position L&D as more than a cost center, Jennifer’s advice was direct.
Work in small areas where you can demonstrate clear value first. Find out what matters to the business, and speak in those terms. Be intentional about showing what you do and why it matters.
Run the Scorecard with your L&D team
Run the Scorecard with your L&D team and you’ll get more than a maturity rating. You’ll see where your team’s perceptions of its own function line up and where they don’t, which is often the most useful signal a structured diagnostic can give you. WeLearn walks your team through the results, places your function on the maturity ladder, and builds out a tailored roadmap to close the gaps that matter most.
Your success story starts here
See how WeLearn can support your team with strategies that deliver measurable impact.
