How do you measure ROI in L&D?

[0:05]People often tell me that it's difficult to measure the ROI of learning, whether it's technology-based or classroom-based or somewhere in between or a mixture of the two. How are you guys tackling that to help your customers understand their ROI? I I think I think it genuinely is hard to be able to measure the ROI of learning, and whoever finally cracks that in a totally quantifiable, standupble way, um, is going to have, you know, really hit on something. Because it's still really hard to be able to draw the line directly between this learning program and that business outcome. But I think there are a series of measures that you can take along the way that help to be able to say, actually, this has had an impact. So, um, typical ways that we do it are some sort of soft proxy measures, if you like, you know, there's feedback about the programs - did I learn something new, et cetera. But then you can have changes in confidence measures, so that's a big one in terms of how we look at changes in the likely behaviors of people who have taken the programs - they were, you know, a two out of five on confidence in digital beforehand, they're a four out of five on confidence in digital afterwards. Um, and then there are sort of other ways that you can try to sort of shape the before and after measures for learners' impact. So one of those might be something that we've done in a big project with Dentsu Aegis, for example, where line manager ratings have been used on the performance of people who engaged in the program we created with them, before and after the program. And typically we saw a forty percent improvement in ratings as a result of people being on the program versus not on the program. So that was kind of an interesting measure beyond self-certifying that I am more confident. It was sort of, you're more confident and your line manager thinks you're doing a better job. And then, I suppose, the third way in which we do it - and there's a really good example that we did with Glaxo Smith Kline - we did a great, big, thousands of people marketing capability program, and that had a couple of things that were about trying to measure the real impact that people had in the business as a result of the program. So we created these things after learning modules and interventions called application periods, which was not people applying to something. It was they are now going to apply the learning for a period, and at the end of that they wrote individual case studies about what they had done and what business impact it had. And GSK gathered 2,000 of these from across across the business from the people who had been on the program, and they were individual stories that said, 'I took a framework, or a concept, or something that I had learned from the multi-channel marketing certificate that we built for them, and I applied it in these ways. And it had x, y, z impacts in terms of business metrics and ways of working for me,' and so they created a lovely set of stories around these 2,000 application case studies in order to be able to demonstrate the impact that the program had had. And it sort of went further to the extent that they embedded some of the concepts and the frameworks from the learning into their annual business planning process, such was the impact of what they saw people doing with it. Wow! So there are ways of doing it, it just takes work, but if the will is there, the result can be achieved. I think that's I think that's right, but it is undoubtedly - as you said - it involves quite a lot of work to be able to do it. But to some extent, you think, when you're doing things at huge scale, if you're an L&D person, if you're the person who's responsible for that decision-making, you absolutely don't want to put yourself in a position where you can be accused of having launched something that nobody's ever going to see the output of, you know. people are less accepting of training for training's sake now than I think they were years ago. Absolutely.