Measuring the impact of training is tricky:

• How do you measure awareness?
• How do you measure customer service?
• How do you measure employee engagement?
• How do you measure the ability of the executive team to think strategically?

​
And how do you measure all these things in a way that the business cares about? (hint: they do not care that 83% of our learners completed the eLearning module).

But let's be clear... this is not just an L&D problem — it's a business problem. "Business" people are notoriously bad at measuring the impact of their initiatives. In fact, many initiatives don't even get off the ground because those in charge can't figure out how they would measure their effectiveness.

And so, they typically avoid doing it all together...

In L&D, we've been hammering away at this for decades. Pumping out training on demand, simply because we're asked to.

Often, we shy away from measurement because we might get found out — "what if we measure it and nothing changes? Or what if we measure it and it gets worse?! God forbid! Better to avoid measurement and keep things fluffy and vague".

Of course, this is a surefire way to reduce our perceived value. We saw this during the pandemic when many L&D functions were disposed of.

But businesses are becoming streetwise — they must. Times are tough and they need to know their dollars are being invested wisely.

And so, demonstrating our value is more important than ever.

"My project moved the X needle by Y percent".

Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.

The good news? Measuring things is a skill. A skill even dummies like me can master (and we're talking about a dummy who needed extra maths tutoring at school and who was also once ejected from algebra class for telling the teacher his homework was as easy as pi).

Once we understand how measurement works, we can measure anything in a meaningful way — including any training.

But how?

Community member Jerald Rogers has created a series of expert posts inside LRN DEV REV, and he's agreed to let me share them with you via email too!

So, in the next few emails, I'll share some tips on how to do this.

Stay tuned...
- Ant

PS. In addition to these emails, we're running some member-only practical workshops in which you can practise measuring the impact of your own training initiatives — click here to join.​

PPS. If you'd like to receive this series of emails, but currently only receive my emails intermittently, click here to opt-in to daily.​