Case Study
How Jushi's L&D team learned to speak the language of the business
- 08 Apr, 2026
- 8 min read
In this case study
Table of Contents
"We really can't speak the language of L&D. We have to speak the language of the business."
Jushi Holdings is a multi-state cannabis operator with 43 retail locations across nine states. The business spans cultivation, manufacturing, processing, wholesale, and retail, each vertical with its own operational demands. Because cannabis remains federally unregulated, every state sets its own compliance requirements. For L&D, that means building training that functions like a multinational company’s, inside a single country.
Against that backdrop, Jushi’s L&D team has spent four years building something most L&D functions struggle to build: a direct, measurable connection between training and business results.
The challenge
L&D teams in fast-moving, operationally complex businesses face a common problem. They’re busy. They’re responsive. And the work they do rarely gets connected to the numbers leadership tracks.
At Jushi, the L&D function covered a wide scope from day one — new hire through executive, across every vertical, across multiple states with different regulatory requirements. Requests came in constantly. The team built content. But without a formal intake and scoping process, there was no consistent way to evaluate whether a request was actually a training problem, or to agree upfront on what success looked like.
The result was familiar: L&D measured what was easy to count. Who attended. Whether they liked it. The business measured what mattered to them. And the two didn’t always connect.
The approach: measure what the business measures
Valerie Marsh, Senior Director of Learning and Development at Jushi, built the team’s approach around two questions that come before any project starts. Is this actually a training problem? And if it is, what number should move as a result?
A formal ticketing and scoping process replaced ad hoc requests. Before any project began, the team identified a business metric to track and required pre-numbers from the business to measure against post-implementation.
The language changed. Not “we trained 47 people.” But “turnover dropped” or “ramp time decreased.”
Two examples show what that looks like in practice.
Cash handling accuracy. Cannabis dispensaries operate as cash-only businesses, subject to casino-level cash handling protocols monitored by state regulators. Errors in balancing cash drawers were widespread across Jushi’s retail locations, running into the thousands of dollars unaccounted for per week, nationwide. The L&D team built a training combining an e-learning component with structured on-the-job training led by subject matter experts. Within 30 days, errors dropped by over 90%. Within 90 days, the problem had nearly disappeared.
New employee onboarding. In a high-turnover industry, getting new dispensary agents to full productivity quickly matters. Ramp time was running between nine and twelve months. After implementing a structured 30-day onboarding program, the team brought that down to 60 to 90 days. Voluntary turnover in pilot locations dropped significantly within six months of launch.
These weren’t L&D metrics. They were business metrics, and that’s the point.
The scorecard: naming the gaps
Even with strong results at the business unit level, questions remained. How mature was the L&D function overall? Where were the real gaps? And how did the team’s own view of its work compare to how the business saw it?
To answer those questions, Jushi’s L&D team worked with WeLearn to complete the Learning Strategy Scorecard, a diagnostic tool that gives L&D teams a structured view of where their function stands across six dimensions: alignment to business strategy, learning governance, technology and ecosystem integration, content and experience strategy, measurement and analytics, and culture and change readiness. Teams work through 30 statements across those dimensions, generating an overall maturity score and a detailed dimension-by-dimension profile that shows where they’re strong, where they have gaps, and where to focus next.
Scores map to four maturity levels. Reactive functions are compliance-driven and largely disconnected from business strategy. Operational functions show some alignment to business goals but are still seen primarily as a support function. Strategic functions are data-informed with active leadership sponsorship. Transformational functions are fully embedded as a driver of business performance.
For Jushi, the overall score landed between reactive and operational, which was roughly where Valerie expected. But the score itself wasn’t the most valuable part.
"I think it helped to realize we kind of were where I thought we were. But more than that, when a professional outside your organization says the same things you've been saying internally, your team hears it differently."
The scorecard gave external validation to a direction the team was already moving in. The philosophy Valerie had been building, question the brief, partner with the business, measure outcomes not activity, was confirmed as the right approach. For a team that hadn’t come from traditional L&D backgrounds, that mattered.
Strengths showed up in strategic alignment and content relevance. Gaps surfaced in governance maturity, technology visibility, and measurement and culture. Those gaps weren’t uniform across the business, which matters in a company operating across verticals as different as retail dispensaries and cannabis cultivation. L&D’s relationship with the retail side is four years deep. The cultivation and manufacturing teams are newer territory, with leadership only recently engaged in building formal training infrastructure. The scorecard made that unevenness visible and gave the team a way to prioritize accordingly.
From insight to action
WeLearn worked with Valerie to interpret the results through a maturity report, translating the scores into a clear picture of priorities and next steps. It also surfaced a natural follow-on question: how does the business perceive L&D compared to how L&D perceives itself?
WeLearn’s leadership version of the scorecard is designed to answer that. It has just gone out to ten leaders across Jushi’s verticals. What comes back will inform not just where the gaps are, but how the team closes them.
What's next
Valerie’s goal for 2026 is direct: fully operational across all verticals, and moving retail, where L&D is already established, toward managed maturity.
The real measure of progress is whether leaders are calling the team before a new process rolls out, not after.
"I want them to think about us at the beginning of that process rather than at the end of it."
Moving from responsive to strategic means being a partner in decisions, not a resource that gets called in once they’ve been made.
Advice for learning leaders
Know your gaps, then verify them.
Most L&D leaders have a sense of where their function stands. The WeLearn strategy scorecard either confirms that instinct or challenges it. Either outcome is useful. The risk of assuming you already know is staying comfortable with a picture that may not match how the business actually experiences you.
Speak the language of the business you’re in.
The measures that matter in cannabis are not the measures that matter in financial services or healthcare. The principle is the same everywhere: find out what the business tracks and connect your work to those numbers. Participation rates and satisfaction scores don’t help a leader make a decision. Turnover rates and ramp times do.
See where your L&D function stands.
Take the WeLearn Learning Strategy Scorecard at learningstrategyscorecard.com.
If you’d like to talk through your results, reach us at strategy@welearnls.com.
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