The majority of training programs are created in the wrong order. Starting with “What content do we have?” “What do employees think they need?” or “What did the last team develop?” isn’t just a flawed approach, it’s a common reason learning and development (L&D) budgets are slashed, no matter how critical the need and how good the content is. Fixing this isn’t a matter of fixing the content (although we can help with that, too). It’s about starting from a whole new point altogether.
Start With Business Goals, Not Learning Objectives
Prior to developing any modules, L&D leaders must have a discussion with business unit leaders, and pose a singular question: what are the expected outcomes for this part of the business over the next year?
At first glance, this seems like an easy conversation to have. But in reality, it does not often occur. Instead, an L&D team is given a training “order” and the expectation is that they simply fill it. What I’d encourage the L&D team to do in that case is ask themselves if they can translate the corporate goal that training request is intended to support into specific, measurable, frontline-employee behaviors. If, for example, the company’s strategic goal is to enter a new market, you need to identify what specific behaviors the sales team, the customer success team, and even the product team has to do differently in that new market. If the strategic goal is retention, you need to identify which behaviors at the frontline of the organization are positively or negatively correlated with retention.
This is where training and development programs justify their seat at the strategic table. When you can speak to business outcomes, fewer errors, more quickly getting new employees up to speed, greater quota attainment, you’re not asking the C-suite to simply “believe in” training and development. You are outlining a clear pathway between developing your workforce and driving overall business performance.
If the L&D team focuses on the outcomes request first, then the amount of coursework required and the way it’s been used are small, secondary considerations. The rubber will meet the road when you need to put your ideas in a syllabus form, but at that point, you will have a clear picture of where you’re going.
Apply the Kirkpatrick Model in Reverse
Most L&D teams are familiar with the Kirkpatrick Model. Four levels: Reaction, Learning, Behavior, Results. In practice, however, the approach tends to sequence up from Level 1, design training, measure if people liked it, determine if they learned something, hope it changes behavior, and eventually maybe quantify some business result.
This approach is broken.
Instead, start at Level 4. Identify the business results that need to change. Reduced compliance violations. Increased customer satisfaction scores. Shorter sales cycles. Whatever the strategic objective requires. Then work down: what behaviors at Level 3 would result in those outcomes? What knowledge and skills at Level 2 do employees need to exhibit those behaviors? And only then, what training delivery method at Level 1 would effectively build that knowledge and skill?
This isn’t an intellectual exercise. It makes all the difference between a learning program based on what’s interesting or requested versus one that’s designed to ensure a specific behavior change that has a real business cost.
Designing from the top down also results in clear evaluation metrics. You already know what success looks like before the training even begins. That dramatically improves your chances of proving that the program had a positive impact.
Integrate Learning Data With Business Systems
Here’s where most organizations have a real infrastructure gap. Training data is over here, in the LMS. Sales data’s over there, in the CRM. HR performance data? That’s in the HRIS. The systems don’t talk, so you can’t prove a direct line between the training and the business results.
Closing that gap takes two things: a technical layer that connects the systems, and the will to use the data that generates to make decisions.
Technically, xAPI is the thing that lets us track learning experiences outside the LMS: on-the-job, in simulations, from apps and videos, and in games and other more interesting engagement methods. However learning professionals need more than just data streaming out of more interactive content; we need that data to interact with the other kinds of employee data in our organization. CRM data, or core HR data, or whatever.
xAPI by itself doesn’t get us there, it just opens the door. Instead, we need to send our xAPI data somewhere else that can join it with the rest of our organization’s data, and there do the kinds of analyses that tell us whether our employees who completed a training actually did go on to produce better business results.
Organizations wanting to add capability here should review what the market’s top learning analytics platforms actually offer before committing to a technical stack, you might be surprised by how mature the market is. The difference between an LMS dashboard and one of these integrated analytics solutions is enormous. The integrated products will let you ask different questions, worth remembering because the tool you use for analysis determines where you’ll invest your resources developing learning content. If you think about it now, you’re less likely to throw out your investment in a year because you’ve moved in a different strategic direction.
Once you have integrated data, you can move from descriptive analytics (what happened?) to predictive analytics (what will?). That’s forecasting the future skill shortages before they become the performance problems, and having training ready and waiting for some emerging business need before the gap arrives. This is what strategic L&D looks like.
Stop Tracking Vanity Metrics
Completion rates and satisfaction surveys are not indicators of business outcomes. Some even refer to satisfaction surveys as “smile sheets”. Although these measures are easy to collect and share, they provide very little information on training effectiveness.
According to LinkedIn Learning’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report, learning and development (L&D) leaders prioritize linking learning programs to business objectives. However, 82% of L&D professionals indicate that their senior management require more solid evidence on the business impact of training other than basic consumption measures.
Most L&D teams still track learning activities and consumption, such as the number of employees who took a course or how many hours of training were completed. For many, that’s enough: L&D budgets justify spending as long as the training is made available and accessed. But those leading organizations are increasingly leveling up to measure the real results of training. They track leading business indicators improved by training (customer satisfaction, time to market, turnover, etc.), and metal indicators that can be directly linked to the training itself.
Conduct Skill Gap Analyses With Operational Data
Identifying the gap in skills and training employees seems easy, just determine what they lack and teach them. However, many organizations either use self-assessed data or annual performance reviews, which are outdated even before the training begins.
A more effective method is to pull data directly from operational metrics. If customer satisfaction is decreasing in a specific area that’s a data point. If a team’s error rates are going up, that’s a point. If sales conversions are down post a product switch, that’s a point. These are not simply performance issues; they’re performance-to-training problems that only need to be diagnosed.
Using baseline performance data from real operations reveals where skill gaps are actually slowing strategic performance. This is a much firmer foundation than sending out a fill-in-the-boxes survey to all managers. It makes a much stronger case for training investment, because you’re not guessing; there’s a problem and it’s showing up in the numbers.
This kind of data-based approach also changes how the L&D function is perceived more widely in the organization. Think about it, you come into a business meeting with operational data and a clear diagnosis in mind, you’re not a vendor looking for work, you’re a consultant helping to solve a problem.
Build Shared Accountability Between L&D and the Business
Training often fails to change behaviors on the job because responsibility for seeing that it sticks is fragmented. L&D might design training, but it is the business unit manager who owns the outcome (application of skills on the job). Business unit managers don’t own the bridge between training and application, L&D does, but they have no authority over it. There is no accountability on either side for whether the bridge actually works. The fix is to hold managers in both the business unit and L&D accountable for the bridge. Make part of their performance scorecard the on-the-job application of what was learned in training, and monitor they work together to make that happen.
Adopt Iterative Cycles Instead of Annual Programs
Large-scale, annual training initiatives made sense when building content was expensive and time-consuming. That’s less true now. Organizations that wait 12 months to revise a training program in response to performance data are responding to a business environment that may look completely different by the time the update ships.
A better model is continuous iteration. Use real-time learning analytics to spot where employees are dropping off, where knowledge retention is weakest, and where behavioral transfer isn’t happening. Then update micro-learning modules in response. This doesn’t mean constant churn, it means treating training the way a product team treats a product: shipping, measuring, and adjusting on a regular cadence.
This is also how upskilling and reskilling programs stay relevant during rapid technological or market shifts. If the business changes direction, an agile training infrastructure can respond in weeks, not quarters.
Build the Feedback Loop Before You Launch Anything
Organizations that achieve this do not consider alignment as a single effort. Instead, they create a mechanism for connecting business strategy, workforce capability, training design, and performance data collaboratively and continually.
The process starts with strategy, moves to an analysis of the skills you need for that strategy, influences the design of the training that helps build those skills, creates data on how that training is being consumed, connects that data with data on business performance, and then uses all of this as the foundation for the next strategy discussion. When L&D is working inside that instead of detached from it, training isn’t something you get a strict budget for, it’s a tool that business leaders want to take advantage of.
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