Learning functions with a formal strategy in place outperform their peers on business alignment and measurement.
More in WeLearn’s upcoming Learning Strategy Benchmarking Report, out in October.
In January we published the first WeLearn learning strategy benchmark, with survey responses from L&D leaders who rated their own function against the 30 practices in the Learning Strategy Scorecard, a self-assessment of learning maturity. This second report analyzes 258 responses and shows how practices have changed since early 2026.
We set out to identify what separates a learning function that can demonstrate its value from one that cannot. What we found is that budget, headcount and industry account for almost none of that difference!
Learning functions are great at content and delivery, but poor at proving value
The scorecard sorts a function into one of four maturity levels:
- A reactive function will respond only to requests.
- An operational one supports business goals in parts of the organization and runs as a service to the rest.
- A strategic one uses data to decide which programs to build, and leadership is generally backing those priorities.
- A transformational one shapes business decisions.
Four out of five respondents in the latest survey placed themselves in the bottom two levels, and six organizations out of 258 reached transformational.
Results like these do not come from weak delivery. Content and experience strategy scores highest of the six dimensions, nearly six in ten organizations offer learning consistently across video, social and interactive formats, and only 6.2% score 50 or below out of 150. What this tells us is that what learning teams build and how they deliver it is, for the most part, working.
The three lowest-scoring dimensions for 258 L&D functions are measurement, governance and technology, which between them cover how programs get prioritized, what data the function runs on, and what evidence exists that any program changed anything.
- Only a quarter of organizations tie learning outcomes to business impact.
- Two thirds do not use learner data to personalize learning.
Those two findings together describe the position learning leaders occupy. Nearly half of the learning leaders surveyed hold regular conversations with executive stakeholders and call those meetings an “established practice” — but the statement asking whether business leaders see L&D as a strategic enabler scores lower than executive access does. In other words, a function in that position can describe what it has built and delivered, but it cannot make a case for investment.
Bigger budgets and bigger teams don’t mean more mature learning functions
Learning leaders are routinely asked to benchmark against companies of similar size, which makes size the first thing to test and the closest proxy this data holds for resources. If resources set the ceiling, larger organizations would score higher, since they hold larger L&D budgets, larger teams and more capable technology. But here’s what we found:
Above roughly 1,000 employees, headcount stops predicting maturity.
A company of 40,000 people runs its learning function at the same level as a company of 1,200. The advantages of scale are real, and they are offset by what comes with scale: more business units to serve, more stakeholders to align, more legacy systems to connect.
The same holds for industry.
Regulated sectors face review requirements that force a defined approach to training, so you would expect them to score higher, and they do not — all seven sectors in the study average within five points of one another. Industry says almost nothing about how well a learning function is run, which leaves an L&D leader benchmarking by size or by sector comparing themselves against much the same figure either way.
A formal learning strategy lifts a function from “reactive” to supporting business goals
Sorting the same organizations by whether they have completed a formal learning strategy produces the largest difference in the study. Between two organizations of the same size, the one with a strategy in place rates 27 of its 30 practices a full level higher, a gap that would occur by chance in fewer than one survey in ten thousand.
The difference is widest on alignment to business strategy, at 17.5 out of 25 against 12.4, and on measurement and analytics, at 15.4 against 10.6. Those are the two dimensions the strategy work produces directly.
Formalizing a learning strategy means interviewing stakeholders, establishing where the function currently stands, ranking priorities against business goals, and agreeing with leadership how success will be measured. A team with that agreement in place knows which numbers are most meaningful to the organization, while a team without it defaults to completions and satisfaction scores.
Having your strategy on paper changes none of this on its own, which is why partially covering it returns so little. Looking at the data, organizations with a strategy “still in development” score closer to those that never started the work than to those that finished it!
AI readiness in L&D hasn’t improved since January
Having a strategy for AI and automation in learning has barely moved since January, and it remains the weakest of the 30 practices. Interest in AI across the profession has risen sharply in the last nine months, but the practices have not followed suit. What most learning functions have is individuals experimenting (drafting content with AI, for example) without an agreed position on where AI belongs in the function, what processes or workflows it should impact, or what data it runs on.
AI applied to learning needs learner data that is integrated, current and trusted. Every learning platform already records what each employee has completed, and two thirds of organizations do not use that record to personalize learning at all. An organization that buys an AI tool before building that data has bought capability with nothing to apply it to. Deciding which outcomes the function is accountable for determines which data is worth integrating, and that decision belongs to the strategy work.
Out in October
The full report is coming out next month. It’ll cover the six strategy dimensions, what the data shows about company size and industry, and percentile benchmarks for placing your own scores against 258 other organizations. It closes with five key priorities for L&D based on the data.
Complete the Learning Strategy Scorecard and you’ll have your own dimension scores to place against the benchmarks when the report is released!
