The role of L&D is changing. According to Gartner, “Learning and Development functions face growing pressure to deliver critical skills in an environment of fast-changing skills needs, heightened employee expectations, and economic uncertainty.”

How can your company cope? Salvation lies with the strategic potential of L&D. When business leaders see the value of learning, L&D can bridge the talent gap. Using their seat at the business strategy table, L&D can help people develop the critical skills needed to transform and innovate.

But conventional learning goals don’t always resonate with business leaders. Learning leaders need to understand the business and speak the language of the C-suite to effectively communicate the value and positive impacts of L&D. Essentially, they need to answer the question “How does learning help advance our entire organisation?”

 

How does L&D impact profit?

To prove to leadership that L&D is business critical – and to safeguard your learning initiatives – you must understand how leadership thinks and prioritises company initiatives. What is leadership’s top priority? Profit. And how can L&D impact profit?

There are two options: increase the money the company earns or decrease the money the company spends. While both boost the bottom line, leadership often prioritises revenue-growing initiatives over cost savings.

If you want L&D and your learning initiatives to be a business priority, show how learning impacts profit or enables key corporate initiatives. The literal gold standard is linking learning initiatives to revenue increase. But if you can’t connect learning to revenue, then at least prove how your learning initiatives save the company money or contribute to strategic company goals.

 

Business metrics or KPIs, but be specific

Along with the right language, L&D also needs to translate its own metrics for leadership. This isn’t to say that L&D metrics aren’t useful. They can be important to your department for tracking and analysing the efficiency of your learning programs.

But presenting participation rates, completion figures, and engagement hours won’t impress your CEO because they’re only interim measures that aren’t directly connected to outcomes. If you are not sure what kind of metrics to use, try to connect learning to money earned, money saved, and risks reduced.

If you have them, utilise the specific business metrics or KPIs that your leadership has highlighted, demonstrating how you support their goals. And as skills become the new currency of work, measure the skills your employees have and the skills they can develop to increase revenue or improve efficiency.

Below, are my tips to help L&D leaders avoid common slip-ups when showing the C-suite that investing in learning initiatives is critical, whether they‘re new programs, content, technologies or headcount. 

 

1. Engage stakeholders: When you communicate and collaborate to gain support and insights, you can avoid frustrating your colleagues by asking what their most important goals and objectives are. Understand their objectives and tie your deliverables to the most important things for your stakeholders.
    
2. Embrace measurement and analytics: When you build a robust system for tracking and analysing L&D outcomes, aligning them with business key performance indicators (KPIs), you can ensure informative results aren’t overlooked.
    
3. Speak the language of business: When you translate L&D outcomes into C-suite terms and metrics — such as profit margins, revenue growth, and market share — you can convince senior leaders to value your programs. Measure the business outcomes, don’t just report on learning activity.
    
4. Remember that L&D solutions are not one-size-fits-all: When you customise L&D initiatives to address the unique goals of different groups, you can prevent learning from becoming exclusive and ineffective. 
    
5. Make change management a key part of every process: Change is usually challenging, so when you incorporate change management strategies into your L&D pitch (and address resistance) you can sidestep the creation of an environment that’s unsupportive of new initiatives.
    
6. Take a long-term view: By ensuring a future-ready workforce with the skill capabilities to meet future demand, you can prevent learning programs from being viewed as nice-to-have nonessentials.
    
7. Include qualitative benefits: When you acknowledge and communicate the intangible benefits of L&D, sharing how they contribute to a positive work environment and long-term business health, you can squash the misperception that learning is less important than other business functions.
    
8. Approach evolution as a long-term imperative: When you tend to the needs of your programs in a never-ending process of improvement, you can keep people from viewing learning as a one-and-done and continually refine dated approaches.
    
9. Keep your eye on the big picture: When you regularly take time to step back and consider the major changes your program requires, you can avoid getting mired in momentum-killing details.

 

Collin Poage 

Vice President of Business Consulting at Degreed