Beyond Attendance: How to Actually Measure L&D Impact

It’s not enough to know who showed up!

Yet for many organisations, Learning & Development (L&D) is still evaluated by surface-level data: attendance rates, satisfaction surveys, and generic feedback. While it’s encouraging to hear that people “liked” a session, these measures tell us very little about what’s really happening, how learning is applied, what impact it has, and whether it’s helping the business grow.

If we want L&D to be seen as a strategic driver, not just a cost centre, we need to start measuring what truly matters.

🙂 ➡️💡- From Smile Sheets to Strategic Insights

Historically, L&D teams have relied on things like:

• Attendance rates

• Completion stats

• Participant satisfaction (Level 1 “happy sheets”)

• Anecdotal feedback

These metrics are easy to collect and present nicely in a quarterly report—but they rarely correlate with performance or behaviour change. They don’t show how learning supports business outcomes. And they certainly don’t justify investment.

So what should we be measuring instead?

↩️ - Start with the End in Mind

A meaningful L&D evaluation strategy begins by linking learning to organisational goals.

For example, in a recent L&D strategy I developed for a consultancy firm, learning interventions were aligned with tangible business objectives such as:

• Acquiring new clients

• Reducing miscommunication in remote teams

• Improving sales enablement

• Enhancing onboarding for faster productivity

By grounding L&D in business needs, we can start to measure whether it’s making a difference, not just whether it was delivered.

📏 - Why ROI Isn’t Always Enough

Return on Investment (ROI) is often held up as the gold standard, but it’s incredibly hard to apply when learning outcomes are intangible.

Soft skills, leadership development, and cultural initiatives all create real value, but tracking that value in financial terms is complex, time-consuming, and often inconclusive.

And without ROI, it can be difficult to clearly demonstrate success.

That’s where Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) and People Analytics (PA) come in. Both provide credible, practical ways to link learning to business outcomes, especially when traditional ROI just doesn’t fit.

🛠️ - Two Tools That Make a Real Difference

To move beyond vanity metrics, organisations can adopt CBA and PA. Each brings unique value and can be tailored to your organisation’s size, maturity, and goals.

1️⃣ Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA): Simple, Fast, Tangible

CBA compares the costs of a learning intervention to the tangible (or semi-tangible) benefits it produces.

✔ Easy to use✔ Works well for small businesses or low-data environments✔ Especially useful when financial ROI is hard to isolate

Examples:

• Measure time saved through new onboarding processes

• Calculate the cost of miscommunication before and after remote learning initiatives

• Estimate reductions in rework or error rates after training

CBA doesn’t require complex systems—it just requires a clear before-and-after comparison that helps leaders see value.

2️⃣ People Analytics: Powerful, Scalable, Insight-Driven

People Analytics enables deeper evaluation by analysing data related to people, behaviours, and outcomes. It uses statistical, descriptive, and visual tools to tell a story about how people learn and perform over time.

✔ Tracks learning impact over months or years

✔ Helps identify patterns and areas for improvement

✔ Can support advanced methods like predictive modelling or ROI analysis

In one case, a charity used pulse surveys to assess how strongly employees had embraced newly defined values over 18 months. The findings not only demonstrated improved commitment but also highlighted departments where additional support was needed, turning learning insights into targeted action.

📐 - So, What Should You Be Measuring?

Here are a few suggestions, depending on your organisational context:

What to Measure	How to Measure It
Alignment with business goals	Correlate learning objectives with business KPIs
Behaviour or performance change	Surveys, performance reviews, observation
ROI or cost-efficiency	CBA, time saved, error reduction
Engagement with learning	LMS data, completion rates, social learning interactions
Culture and mindset shifts	Pulse surveys, feedback loops, people analytics

And don’t forget: ask the right questions before the learning starts. Define what success looks like, and make sure everyone, from HR to team leaders, knows how it will be measured.

📢 - Data Is Only Half the Story

Numbers alone aren’t enough. To make your insights stick, you need people analytics storytelling, turning data into something meaningful.

Using visuals, trends, and plain language helps stakeholders understand not just what’s happening but why it matters. For example:

• Show how onboarding time decreased after implementing learning pathways

• Illustrate how one department’s engagement increased following a coaching program

• Present the correlation between leadership training and team productivity

Analytics + storytelling = powerful, persuasive insight.

🗣️ - Final Word: Be Strategic, Be Evidence-Based

To build credibility and make smarter decisions, L&D must become more evidence-based. That means designing learning with impact in mind, and then proving it.

Even if ROI isn’t always practical, CBA and People Analytics can provide the clarity you need to show results and improve performance.

By adopting tools like these, you can:

• Show the return on learning investments

• Identify what’s working and what’s not

• Continuously improve your learning strategy

✅ Ready to start measuring what matters?

Let’s move beyond “how many people showed up” and start showing the real impact of learning.

👉 Whether you need help designing a strategy, setting metrics, or analysing results, I’d love to help. Let’s talk about how to make your L&D efforts count.