With L&D budgets often stretched, it’s more important than ever to prove that your training really works.
When you measure what really matters, you’re speaking the language of your business. Executives are likely not interested in quiz scores, they’re interested in things like revenue, productivity and risk reduction.
But let’s face it, not everything that’s easy to measure matters—and not everything that matters is easy to measure. Completion isn’t impact. Participation isn’t performance.
In this post, we’ll explore how to identify the most meaningful metrics to really demonstrate the impact of your training programs.
Combining behaviour and outcome metrics
A lot of training initiatives start by focusing on what the audience should know, but this often misses the bigger picture.
A more effective approach is to work backwards from the business goal: what challenges are you trying to solve, which KPIs or organisational priorities do you hope to improve?
Once this is defined, consider which specific behaviours and skills will drive that change. Knowing this will help you design training content with the relevant information, application activities and resources to support development in those target areas.
After pinpointing the target behaviours, you can define behavioural metrics to track whether your audience are actually applying what they’ve learned in the real world, alongside outcome metrics to measure whether this translates to the anticipated business impact.
This combination ensures you’re not just capturing activity or knowledge, but can credibly demonstrate that the training is driving meaningful change in both behaviour and business results.
Attribution potential
When looking at individual metrics, it’s also important to prioritise those with the most attribution potential. In the complex environment of an organisation, it’s difficult to prove direct causation, but there are some considerations you can use to select metrics that show strong correlation.
Choose metrics that are:
- Closest to the behaviour change your targeting - The closer a metric is to the behaviour change the more confidently you can say “training caused this”. Behaviour level metrics also often show up sooner than performance outcomes, allowing you to see early signs of impact (or lack of).
- Least influenced by external factors - This can be tricky, but aim for metrics that are more likely to be the result of your training intervention than other variables. You may not be able to completely remove external influence, but you try to control for it using things like pilots, control groups, or qualitative feedback to add context.
- Tracked consistently (or are feasible to track reliably over time) - A metric is most useful if you can gather it repeatedly and it’s defined in the same way each time, and ideally you’ll already have a baseline metric to work from. Without consistency it’s impossible to see trends, progress or attribute impact.
Let’s look at some examples
Company A is aiming to improve the skills of their sales force and grow revenue, recognising a need to upskill their employees in areas like lead qualification, objection handling and closing. At first glance, they plan on tracking impact by tracking revenue growth after training.
So what’s the problem here? While a sales revenue increase might indicate that the training was successful, so many other variables could influence this, such as higher marketing leads or seasonal trends, that you can’t confidently attribute the change to training.
A smarter first step would be for Company A to determine whether the training led to behaviour changes across the sales force. Are reps viewing, downloading and using new tools and resources such as discovery call templates or objection handling playbooks? Do manager observations or AI call analytics confirm that reps are applying stronger listening and questioning techniques and value propositioning?
Once behaviour change is confirmed, conversion rate from lead to customer becomes a more telling outcome metric than overall revenue. While not completely devoid of external factors this is more likely to indicate skill development.
Even if revenue dips due to fewer leads, an improved conversion rate shows that salespeople are applying new skills and closing a higher percentage of opportunities.
Company B is shifting from annual appraisals to ongoing performance conversations. Their training program equips managers to set clear goals, give constructive feedback, and run regular coaching-style check-ins.
Rather than relying only on broad outcomes like engagement scores, retention and annual performance ratings, which are influenced by many factors, Company B should first track behavioural metrics such as the frequency of one-to-ones and established goals logged, as well as employee ratings or qualitative feedback on whether those check-ins feel useful and constructive.
On the business side, outcome metrics could include the percentage of goals attained compared to goals set, higher promotion readiness or internal mobility, or reduced turnover of high performers.
Together, these paint a clearer picture of whether new management behaviours are sticking and driving employee performance and satisfaction improvements.
Learning Pool recently supported one of the UK’s leading banks to reimagine their performance review and reward training through a rich video-led simulation. The initiative achieved impressive results, including a shift in pay distribution, 61% reduction in appeals, significant cost savings and a 20% increase in leader confidence.
Design training with the end in sight
As these examples illustrate, when it comes to measuring workplace learning, the most powerful insights come from pairing behavioural metrics (are people doing things differently?) with outcome metrics (is that change delivering business results?).
Choosing metrics that are attributable, close to the desired behaviour, and less influenced by external factors ensures you can credibly demonstrate impact. Starting with the end in sight will also help you design more relevant and useful training and application exercises specifically geared towards meeting these goals, avoiding courses overinflated with information that won’t lead to meaningful business impact.
Get in touch today to find out how Learning Pool can help you design, develop and measure training that really works.
Ruby Brooke-Wilkinson is a Learning Experience Pre-Sales Specialist at Learning Pool. With seven years of learning design experience under her belt, Ruby prides herself on developing innovative solutions to organizational learning challenges.
Striking a balance between creativity, efficiency and value she strives to ensure customers receive solutions that inspire, educate, and get results.
