The legacy of L&D as a corporate training function is proving difficult to overcome for learning leaders trying to establish a position of strategic partnership within their business.
The trouble is the L&D industry has always been optimised for activity. But business executives today want outcomes.
Organisations are navigating tougher compliance requirements, persistent skills shortages, retention challenges and an urgent need to improve productivity.
Budgets are under increasing scrutiny, and business leaders are applying pressure for every function to show measurable value as a result.
Simply reporting that 80 per cent of employees completed compliance training doesn’t answer the questions executives are now pushing L&D to answer:
- Did anything actually change?
- Did the business move forward?
- Did performance improve?
- Did risk reduce?
L&D is stuck in what we are calling The Activity Trap, and escaping it is now a matter of urgency.
A credibility gap
Let’s continue to take compliance training as an example. Compliance is one of the major outcome pillars that L&D leaders are accountable for. But currently 77 per cent of executives say compliance complexity is hurting growth.
The trouble is that many L&D teams still measure compliance by course completion rates (an activity) rather than whether risk has actually been reduced (a valuable outcome).
Completion data has a role to play, particularly in regulated environments. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for proof of reduced risk.
If the takeaway is that compliance training is more complex, and L&D can’t demonstrate clear visibility that people are more capable, compliant and prepared as a result, the value of L&D is called into question.
This pushes it even further away from strategic decision-making. This is what it means to be caught in the Activity Trap.
The L&D industry has always been optimised for activity. But business executives today want outcomes
A new way of thinking
It’s not that the training isn’t valuable. The challenge is proving that value.
Similarly, L&D leaders are aware of the limitations of prioritising activity over business goals, but making the shift isn’t easy.
New research from Kallidus and Fosway confirms it. Just 14 per cent of L&D professionals believe they are ‘advanced’ at mobilising around strategic priorities. Only two per cent think they are advanced at measuring the impact and value they deliver.
Thinking in terms of outcomes isn’t comfortable because traditional L&D was only ever built for delivery.
If teams are to make meaningful progress towards closing the gap between learning activity and business impact, they will need to make adjustments at the very core of how they operate.
So what does this look like in practice?
L&D starts in the wrong place
The organisations pulling ahead are taking a different approach to L&D that starts with a business problem, not learning requests.
Is the objective to:
- Reduce compliance risk?
- Improve retention?
- Increase productivity?
- Drive revenue performance?
From there, they work backwards:
- What intervention will actually move the needle?
- What needs to change in behaviour?
- What capability is missing?
Activity metrics still have a place in an outcomes-led model. Participation, completions, engagement and NPS provide useful hygiene metrics, but they need to be connected to what happens next: whether people change their behaviour, and whether that change leads to measurable business impact.
To demonstrate the business impact of activity, L&D teams must first commit to understanding business problems.
They require goal clarity and a clear definition of the desired outcome. Only then can a delivery plan follow and, critically, the measures of success.
This will mean working with other departments to understand the combination of interventions needed to influence these outcomes, as well as to define and collect the evidence needed to prove results.
The question is never about how much learning was delivered. It’s about how it made a difference
One step at a time
Focusing on one defined objective at a time will ease the transition. It builds confidence in the team, reinforces the value of performance metrics and avoids any risk of sliding back into The Activity Trap.
With each new proof point, L&D credibility within the business will improve, encouraging confidence in the value of learning to meet operational goals.
Crucially, by mapping learning to business goals in this way, and adopting business performance measures rather than tracking activity, L&D will start to demonstrate more than business value.
This distinction will become even more important as AI creates more content and more learning activity, making proof of behaviour change and performance improvement the real differentiator.
It will gain business influence and upgrade its status throughout the organisation as a future key source of strategic value for business stakeholders and workers.
Time to escape The Activity Trap
L&D has the opportunity to prove its worth as a business value driver, but only if it escapes The Activity Trap.
Connecting what L&D delivers to what the business actually cares about means starting small, with clear outcome-led priorities, aligning with business goals from the outset and measuring what changes, not just what happens.
Because, at the end of the day, the question is never about how much learning was delivered. It’s about how it made a difference.
For practical steps to move L&D beyond activity-based learning, read the full report from Kallidus and Fosway.
