What Value Does L&D Provide Anyway?

This seems like a silly question, but how many of you have heard this challenge voiced?  When I’ve heard it, it’s more often referring to the value of our learning and development team versus learning and development in general.  Everyone seems to agree that learning and development is important.  That’s not the issue.  The issue more often seems to be that we don’t quantify or successfully explain HOW important the work we do is.

Our business partners and clients aren’t interested in whether their teams score an 80% on their online quizzes, can define corporate terms, describe a business process, or even demonstrate a certain skill.  At the end of the day, what they care about is performance.  Will the training and deliverables we provide improve the performance of their team?  Will their sales increase or their costs decrease as a result of the training they receive?  Will their errors, injuries, and incidents reduce as a result of what we teach?

Our clients and business partners care about the improvement of their team’s business metrics because this is what makes them successful or not successful.  This is what’s in it for them when it comes to training.

Thus, the value that a learning and development team provides is primarily two-fold:

1) to improve the performance of employees (which decreases costs or increases revenue)

2) to ensure employee compliance to external and internal training requirements (which reduces risk and expense from injuries, errors, fines, and law suits.)

This should be our teams' ongoing mission statement.  It should be printed in big bold letters in conspicuous places.

Lacking this focus on performance and compliance as our mission is the root cause of so many of the most common woes in learning and development.  Without these guiding principles we don’t have consistent performance metrics, objective/performance-based compensation for employees, the ability to prioritize projects fairly and consistently, or properly functioning and easy-to-use learning management systems.

Realizing this and setting this in stone is the first step in the process of becoming a successful learning and development business.  Without this pivotal step, the rest of our business is built on a wobbly foundation and will not achieve its full potential.

In the following articles in this series, I’ll be utilizing the process and models provided in Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great” to outline how to build a successful learning and development business.

Stay tuned!

-Dusty.