A new report published today by Towards Maturity and sponsored by LEO Learning, shows that L&D leaders are more able to demonstrate the value of learning when they work together with business leaders to solve performance problems.
The report, Making an Impact: How L&D Leaders Can Demonstrate Value, draws on the 2015 Towards Maturity Benchmark™ research with more than 600 L&D leaders. It shows that nine-in-ten L&D leaders say they want to positively impact the bottom-line in their organisation. In particular, they want to provide a faster response to changing business conditions, increase on-the- job productivity and improve customer satisfaction.
Piers Lea, Chief Strategy Officer of LEO Learning Learning said:
“LEO Learning believes that demonstrating the business impact of learning is now reaching a critical point for L&D teams. Learning effectiveness is one of the last unmeasured areas of business spend and this is becoming unacceptable. By measuring better, we know we can save huge amounts of money for our clients and drive significant further investment into what does work. It’s clear from this research that organisations that are using technology to measure improvements are also performing so much better than those that do not, with some reporting threefold improvements. Now we need to inspire L&D leaders to believe in the importance and power of big data, in order to develop a strategy around this insight and build it into their processes.”
L&D is struggling to quantify some of the basic indicators of success. Despite the fact that 96% of learning leaders are looking to technology to improve the way they gather and analyse data on learning impact, only 17% are doing it – down from 26% in 2010. 24% know how long it takes for learners to become competent in their job roles and just 17% know the opportunity costs about the different ways that staff learn.
The report shows that only 31% of L&D leaders work up front with business leaders to identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that they want to improve. However, those that do are more likely to report on the business impact of learning and work collaboratively with business stakeholders throughout the learning process in order to improve performance.
At LEO Learning, we build measurement in to all our programmes to help client communicate real success and gain increased investment. The report explores new measures of learning impact, how employees want to learn, how top performing organisations are demonstrating impact and why it is imperative for L&D to act now.