The necessity to align with the business is causing a stir in the learning community. However, much of the commotion is only background noise because the alignment is frequently ill-defined and hazy. L&D teams often fail to describe the link between training and business objectives adequately. Instead, training is produced with the hope that it will have an impact. A repeatable approach for L&D to explicitly articulate the relationships between training and business goals is required. It entails putting alignment first in the measurement procedure.

The Challenges of Measuring Business Impact of Training

While there is no disagreement about whether or not training professionals should quantify the business impact of training of their programmes, doing so can be difficult. There is no straightforward way to gather analytics that can quantify business impact is one of them.

Even if L&D professionals understand what they should be doing to assess the effect, they frequently lack the resources-both people and tools — to collect the additional data, analyse it, and derive actionable insights.

Because of this difficulty, L&D professionals either never attempt to quantify impact or do so inordinately slowly. It’s possible that by the time the insights arrive, it’ll be too late for the company to apply them. As a result, training investments made in one financial year may have little bearing on corporate goals in the following year.