Every year, we look forward to running our “Measuring the Business Impact of Learning” survey. It’s an excellent opportunity to sense-check our thoughts on measurement with the views of frontline L&D leaders and professionals.
As champions of using data to guide your people strategy, we relish the opportunity to explore the challenges, successes, and methodologies adopted across the industry. It also provides us with valuable external perspectives that allow us to assess our own views and thesis.
The road to success: Understanding high-performing learning organizations
Recent years have seen clear—and somewhat frustrating—trends arise. There is a clear belief that measuring learning impact is possible, and there is a desire to do it.
But core challenges around resourcing remain. Budget, people, technology, and time appear to be limited, or at least not allocated to the learning measurement and evaluation function. Learning leaders consistently report “competing priorities” as their primary challenge.
In short, only a few organizations are prepared to throw the right resources at measuring learning’s impact. And those that do see the benefits. From insights that span extended enterprise networks, to responding swiftly in a crisis, last year’s report highlighted examples of how high-performing learning organizations demonstrate greater business agility.
That’s not to mention the broader benefits—specifically, a better learning experience that helps you upskill and retain your staff.
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From data to action: Empowering learning leaders to drive change
And so this year, we set a challenge for ourselves: to fully understand the traits of high-performing learning organizations. Why do they perform better? What lessons can others learn to kick-start and progress their own measurement journey?
We want learning leaders who read this report to take it away and start demanding the resources they need based on the brighter future it can offer. And so, to do this, we’ve tackled data in a new way. In our statistical analysis, we used the question “How is your learning function perceived by the rest of the organization?” as a dependent variable.
Would those who placed themselves at the top of the scale (who answered “L&D is a strategic partner with the business deemed essential to maintain business health”) respond to the rest of the questions differently from those at the bottom of the scale (“L&D is seen as a shared service organization utilized as needed by the business”)?
We tested for statistically significant correlations between question responses and then built a regression model to reveal the characteristics of “strategic partner” learning organizations.
We'll be bringing you more updates on the core findings, but in the meantime you can dive into the report to discover the traits of the trailblazers.
About the author
Having worked in almost every job going in marketing, Ash loves the diversity and variation of challenges marketing handles. From acknowledging pain points to genuine, straightforward messaging, there’s a lot to be said and many ways to say it!
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