Talent Development's
ROI Playbook
Career-driven learning is key
As companies navigate technological transformation, talent leaders must energize top talent, optimize programs, and inspire skill-building to stay future-ready.
The key is career-driven learning—combining upskilling, coaching, and internal mobility to align employees' career goals with organizational needs. For companies to thrive, employees must be empowered to excel.
Progress toward career goals is employees’ #1 motivation to learn
Elevate career-driven learning by measuring what matters
As AI transforms work at an unprecedented pace, learning and upskilling are critical to business survival. However, measuring the ROI of L&D remains challenging, with a disconnect between L&D and business metrics of success.
This moment offers Learning and Talent Development professionals a chance to elevate career-driven learning and clearly communicate its impact. Shifting career-driven learning from a perk to a priority is no longer just important—it’s urgent. This playbook provides guidance and resources to measure and demonstrate its value to your business.
This playbook presents proven strategies from global L&D leaders for leveraging three key ROI opportunities.
Clarify key business priorities related to learning
Too often, Learning and Talent Development professionals aren't measured against P&L and L&D isn't seen as a strategic business driver.
Prioritize metrics that tie to business goals
Don't stop at measuring learning hours and seat time — measure metrics that matter to the business.
Capture and communicate success to stakeholders
There’s no blueprint, and frequently, few resources for showcasing upskilling metrics in a consistent, repeatable and transparent way.
ROI opportunity
Clarify key business priorities
Understand the stakeholder landscape
Breaking it down
Connect with key people
Pacing it out
Measuring the impact of learning and talent programs is as much about stakeholder management as metrics.”
Naphtali Bryant
Executive Coach and Leadership Development Consultant at RAC Leadership
Understand the stakeholder landscape
Understanding your key stakeholders is vital to demonstrating impact. In complex organizations it can be hard to know who or how to engage, so the experts we spoke to recommended using two criteria to define key stakeholders:
Their level of approval
Decision makers
These are the people with more direct authority over your program, such as division leaders, C-Suite executives, or GMs who own budget decisions.
Influencers
These are the people with more indirect authority who can be vocal supporters for your program. LinkedIn’s Stephanie Conway often starts by talking to chiefs of staff who deeply understand the needs of the business leaders they support. Others may include long-tenured employees, or respected front-line managers.
Their starting perception
Advocates
Your goal is to pull your stakeholders toward this end of the spectrum.
Skeptics
As Thomson Reuters’ Chris Louie says, it’s often most important to start with your skeptics to ensure your learning program addresses their priorities.
Any time you have an initiative, you’re going to have skeptics. You need to understand their personal hang-ups and perspectives. Ask them about their experience and what’s already working for them. You’re able to overcome their skepticism when you can connect to things they are already doing and have confidence in.”
Chris Louie
Head of Talent Development at Thomson Reuters
Connect with key people
Connecting directly with stakeholders is key to getting proper context. Mark Pearson, VP of Talent, Culture and Community at AMD, recommends an annual listening tour to understand the C-suite’s talent needs. If your stakeholder engagement isn’t at that stage of maturity, even a few 1:1s with key leaders is a good place to start.
A roadmap for stakeholder alignment:
Recommended stakeholder questions:
• What are your top 3-4 strategic objectives?
• What are the biggest talent and skill pain points and bottlenecks in the business?
• What impact has learning and career dev had on your business? What additional impact would you like to see?
• What role have learning and career development played in your own success?
As you listen, pay attention to:
• Business goals, objectives and investment priorities that learning initiatives could support
• Metrics or KPIs used to track performance, like revenue growth, profit margins, retention that you can connect to
• New products, initiatives or services that might require new or different skills inside the organization
• Barriers and pain points that learning programs could help mitigate
Stakeholder map
Use this stakeholder map to identify the key people you need to connect with. This will help you define a path forward and approach for engaging each one.
Ready to see how upskilling can impact your bottom line? Contact sales.
ROI opportunity
Define the right metrics
Shift from engagement to outcomes
Breaking it down
Widen the aperture on what you measure
Pacing it out
Going beyond engagement metrics is far easier said than done.
You are expected to demonstrate impact across the business for outcomes you don’t fully control. As one leader put it, “In L&D, we’re seen as both the silver bullet for business problems and the scapegoat when things go wrong.” This section aims to ease that burden.
The world of work is changing faster than ever, so if you’re sticking with the old feel-good ‘butts-in-seats’ metrics, you’re going to get left behind. It's not about spraying your learning programs and praying someone gets it. Learning programs will be measured by what sticks — metrics like time to execution and increased qualitative feedback in performance reviews will help us show our impact.”
Mark Pearson
VP, Talent, Culture and Community at AMD
Shift from engagement to outcomes
Our simplified version of the Kirkpatrick Model will help you connect learning engagement to business impact:
1. Outcomes
Start by identifying metrics most directly relevant to the business outcomes you and your stakeholders are trying to drive.
2. Skills
Then pinpoint the skills needed to achieve those outcomes.
3. Engagement
Finally, identify the most important metrics that let you know employees are actually attending and engaging with your programs.
88% of organizations are concerned with retention, and providing learning opportunities is the No. 1 retention strategy
Widen the aperture on what you measure
Most common ways to measure the business impact of career development:
1. Employee engagement
72%
2. Employee retention
64%
3. Employees developing new skills
55%
4. Employee promotions
48%
5. Internal mobility rate
32%
We all know mentoring works, but it's difficult to quantify the impact. We took a qualitative approach: through stories, keynotes, photos, and social media features about mentoring at our organization. We knew it was working because when people got promoted, they thanked their mentor by name.”
Ruth Gotian
Chief Learning Officer at Weill Cornell Medicine
Examine your impact
The previous metrics are a solid start, but to engage stakeholders, broaden your focus to the three types of quantitative metrics below
Bottom line results/financial impact
• Increased revenue
• Bigger average deal size (after upskilling sales people)
Productivity, efficiency and output
• New hire time to competence
• Faster ticket resolution
• Fewer injuries
Employee career outcomes that go beyond NPS and other engagement scores
• Improved employee performance
• Employees who up/re-skilled and moved to a new career path
Qualitative metrics that help you connect emotionally with your stakeholders
As CLO of Weill Cornell Medicine, Ruth Gotian is often working with physician leaders who want to see hard numbers for programs where it can be difficult to quantify results, especially at early stages. In these situations, she uses qualitative results to help win hearts and minds.
Impact stories
These can include customer outcomes as well as employee impacts. Ruth highlights moments when an employee who was stuck in their career gets unstuck because of a learning program.
Employee testimonials
Giving employees a platform to publicly speak to the benefits of career development initiatives is a powerful way to win over skeptics.
Manager observations & feedback
Testimonials from leaders highlighting the impact on their teams are especially powerful.
Now it’s your turn
Brainstorm qualitative and quantitative metrics for each level of the impact model.
Ready to see how upskilling can impact your bottom line? Contact sales.
Capture success
Breaking it down
Breaking it down
Pacing it out
Pacing it out
Aligning with the bottom line
Aligning with the bottom line
The only thing more challenging than defining the right metrics is measuring them.
We consulted leading practitioners and gathered the following three tactics for demonstrating measurement. By the end of this section, you’ll have practical guidance on demonstrating program success to internal peers and decision-makers.
Companies that prioritize career development have higher rates of engaged learners and job promotions
2.4x
Break bigger impact metrics into smaller intermediate goals
2.6x
Establish distinct metrics for each program phase to help tell an impact story that builds over time
3.4x
Connect metrics to money made or saved for your business
Measure your impact
Learning and talent development professionals shared three tips for measuring ROI:
Break them down
Break bigger impact metrics into smaller intermediate goals
Pace them out
Establish distinct metrics for each program phase to help tell an impact story that builds over time
Align with the bottom line
Connect metrics to money made or saved for your business
Amazon offers a variety of programs at varying lengths through the Career Choice program. For example, we offer CDL programs which can be completed in a matter of weeks to a Cloud Support specialist that can take up to several months all the way through college degrees which can take years. Regardless of the program duration, we measure success through outcomes to ensure the investment made by Amazon and the employee pays off in terms of improved skills, job placement and wage growth.
Tammy Thieman
Director, Career Choice at Amazon
Breaking it down
If your key metrics are too complex to clearly demonstrate the cause and effect of your learning program, consider breaking them into smaller, more actionable pieces.
For example, LinkedIn’s Stephanie Conway tackled the ambitious goal of building AI expertise in LinkedIn's workforce by focusing on building blocks, like the number of employees consistently using Microsoft Co-Pilot in their work.
Measuring metrics across diverse learning formats
Stacia Garr, Cofounder and Principal Analyst at RedThread, highlights six types of AI learning and the associated metrics to measure progress:
Discover
Helping our employees find the content and opportunities that enable them to become more innovative.
Metric: # of campaigns highlighting internal resources on AI-driven workflows
Connect
Defines how we enable people to connect with each other and learn from each other.
Metric: % of senior leaders who have had planning sessions to incorporate AI in career development
Consume
How we enable our people to access and consume learning content.
Metric: # of individuals who have completed a course on using AI in their role
Perform
Defines how we enable our employees to deliver on the potential for innovation.
Metric: % performance improvement on AI task-based assessments in learning programs
Plan
How we encourage our employees to incorporate innovation in their career development journey.
Metric: % of senior leaders who have had planning sessions to incorporate AI in career development
Experiment
How we provide opportunities for practice of new innovation skills and knowledge.
Metric: # of employees using AI tools in product development processes
Pacing it out
The long-term impact of learning and career development initiatives often clashes with the short-term focus of leaders driven by quarterly results.
Stephanie Conway recommends plotting your impact metrics on multiple time horizons in order to show your stakeholders more immediate progress toward goals that sit further out. Returning to our hypothetical L&D leader aiming to increase AI literacy, she might outline her goals as follows:
Demonstrate impact in stages: in the near term, measure something like training attendance and learning reach; in the medium term, measure skill proficiency; and in the longer term, work toward business impact with a goal like organizational fluency in AI.”
Stephanie Conway
Senior Director, Talent Development at LinkedIn
Take the example of a hypothetical L&D leader showcasing how her initiative increases organizational AI literacy.
By pacing out her impact metrics, our L&D leader is able to keep momentum with her stakeholders.
By end of Q1
100% of senior leaders have had career conversations with their team members on how to incorporate AI in their day-to-day work.
By end of Q2
Increase in % of employees who have completed courses on AI-infused workflows.
By end of Q3
Increase in # of employees frequently using AI tools in day-to-day work.
Align with the bottom line
The best way to get business leaders’ attention is to show how your initiative impacts their bottom line.
HR consultant and L&D expert Amanda Nolen suggests three ways to do this. Ask how your initiative can:
- Make money
- Save money
- Mitigate risk
The Business Value of LinkedIn Learning report gives examples of how to do this for common metrics:
Common metrics
• Increased retention rates
• Increased productivity
• Number of participants enrolled in virtual learning workshops
How to measure financial value
• Quantify the cost of making external hires to show savings
• Calculate the value of hours saved by participants
• Quantify travel costs avoided (if shifting to virtual vs. in-person learning)
You must be able to answer at least one of these three questions: How will this initiative help you to make money, save money or mitigate risk for the company?”
Amanda Nolen
Founder, NilesNolen
Ready to see how upskilling can impact your bottom line? Contact sales.
Creating a virtuous cycle of impact
Measuring ROI should ideally create a positive feedback loop where better input from stakeholders helps you make more informed decisions about where to strategically invest your own resources, leading to better results and positive business outcomes.
It’s a process that’s never finished: a virtuous cycle of impact. Refer back to this playbook when you are making the case to invest in your upskilling programs, and check out the resources from LinkedIn on the following page for further inspiration.
Organizations using LinkedIn Learning courses see higher net revenue and productivity, plus lower learning and hiring costs, leading to an estimated 695% three-year ROI.
Additional Resources
LinkedIn Learning is the only skills development platform built on insights from 1 billion professionals on LinkedIn.
Dive deep into the business value of learning to help organizations stay agile and competitive in a rapidly shifting landscape
Use best-in-class guidance to show business impact of learning programs
From the power of narrative to how L&D can help employees navigate an AI-driven future, learn how five experts showcase the business impact of their programs
Explore eight metrics to show learning program value and engagement
