What L&D measures and what the business wants to know are rarely the same thing.
A learning leader once ran sales training for a retailer’s store staff. Sales jumped that year, and he told the CFO the training was why. The CFO had another explanation: this was the year of the Beanie Babies craze (collectible plush toys that were a 90s obsession), and the stores couldn’t keep them on the shelves. Plenty of things moved that number. Why credit the training?
Most people in L&D have been in that spot. You run a program, something in the business improves, and you’d like to say your work caused it. Then someone asks how you know, and you don’t have a good answer.
When the fix makes it worse
So teams go looking for help, and most of the tools they find measure the wrong thing. They track effort such as hours worked, tasks completed, who spent how long on what. The idea is that if you capture everything going into learning, a number proving its value will come out the other side.
It doesn’t work.
We’ve seen leaders spend heavily on platforms that need a full-time person to run them. The inputs are guesses, because nobody really knows whether a project took five hours this week or fifteen, so people estimate and move on. The output is an estimate built on other estimates, and it’s easy to pick apart.
The bigger problem is that this ignores how L&D works. Salaried teams don’t bill their time by the hour. They put in whatever it takes to hit a deadline, sometimes sixty or seventy hours in a hard week, and that doesn’t fit neatly on a timesheet. And then for the people on the team who are paid by the hour, when their logs show more time than they were paid for, a reporting exercise turns into a payroll and compliance problem. After all that, you still end up with a report nobody trusts.
Counting the wrong thing
Even when tracking works, it answers the wrong question. Add up the hours and tasks that go into a program and you learn how busy the team was, not whether any of it helped the business. One leader told us she’d rather do the work than spend her week logging how long the work took, and she’s right. ‘Busyness’ was never the point.
"Measurement" covers a lot of ground
Some of the trouble predates the software. “Measuring learning” sounds like one thing, but it covers several. The measurement models L&D leans on — Kirkpatrick, Phillips, Thalheimer, and others, each measure something different, and most were never built to put a dollar figure on impact. None of them are wrong, the best model is usually the one your team will use. Still, when leadership asks what the business got back, most of these models are answering a different question: whether the learning worked, not what it returned to the business.
Knowing whose door to knock on
Leadership does ask what learning is worth, and it’s often the CFO (who decides where the budget and investment go) doing the asking. So if you want to show your work paid off, the CFO is who you have to convince — in their terms.
What would convince them almost never lives in your LMS. Completion rates and quiz scores don’t speak to the business. The evidence you need is a business result — lower turnover, faster ramp time for new hires, fewer safety incidents, more deals closed — and that data sits out in the business with whoever owns it. Prying it loose can be the hard part. In some companies, the people sitting on bonus and commission data treat it as off-limits. In others, the head of sales hands the same figures over right away. So the difficulty comes down to knowing who owns the data you need, and getting them to agree, up front, to share it.
There’s another reason this matters. Over a year, priorities move and the thinking behind early decisions fades. A program the business chose to set aside in January can come back as a question in June: why don’t we have this? A shared record of what was agreed — what mattered, what was paused, and why — is as valuable as the numbers. It gives everyone the same reference point and keeps teams aligned as things change.
A different conversation
A better version of this is easy to picture. A learning leader walks into the annual review and, instead of defending a budget, walks through a simple story: here’s what we set out to change, here’s what we spent, here’s what the business saw, here’s how those compare. No invented ROI. No argument about timesheets. Just reasoning everyone in the room can follow because you’re speaking the language of the business.
That story doesn’t start with measurement. It starts with strategy. Naming the business outcomes your work is meant to move, and agreeing up front who owns each one. Once that’s settled, measuring impact is mostly follow-through: you already know what you were trying to change, so you track whether it changed. What you end up with is a straight line from your learning strategy to a fiscal story the business trusts. Drawing that line — connecting strategy on one end to financial impact on the other — is the part almost everyone in our space is struggling with, and it’s where the rest of this blog series is headed.
Once that kind of conversation is normal, L&D will no longer just be taking orders. It will have a real say in where the budget goes because the value of its work is finally clear.
Where this goes next
This is the first blog in a short series. Over the coming weeks we’ll get into how the existing models we referred to differ, why so few of them speak the language of a CFO, and what it takes to measure impact instead of effort.
