L&D Hooked On A Feeling
If you are an executive who has approved a learning budget based on a “feeling,” you are not alone. But you may be at risk.
For decades, the industry has relied on the ultimate oxymoron: the training’s happy sheet. We’ve been told that if employees enjoyed the “training session,” the coffee was hot, and the lunch catering struck just the right meal for each attendee, the investment was a success. But satisfaction is not a business metric.
In fact, relying on vanity metrics is the clearest sign that your organization is merely managing budget expenditure rather than a Business Performance System.
So, what are you doing? Are you merely spending the learning budget?
Discover a results-first operating model that aligns learning with business objectives before a single module is designed.
Movies, Stats, And L&D
Even though training’s happy sheets are useful to some extent, they are not a result. They are a sentiment.
To understand the difference, allow me a brief analogy from a real-world Croat (yes, we’ve been around since the 7th century, look it up).
I believe that art is to evoke reaction, passion, emotion. A work of art makes a true impact, lingering with you for days, and provoking you to think about it. For the sake of the analogy, let’s agree on these postulates.
Recently, a domestic, very commercial comedy came out in Croatia. It is really a big deal for a country whose film industry is at least 50 times smaller than the US. For the sake of the comparison: Croatia’s most successful film ever would represent less than 0.5% of what a major US blockbuster earns domestically. Croatia’s entire annual box office (around $20–26 million total for all films) is smaller than what a single Hollywood blockbuster makes in its opening weekend in the US market.
Oh, and this particular movie is the most successful yet here. Ha!
Anyway, it’s the most successful Croatian box-office movie ever. The PR is relentless: epic, amazing, a sequel has already been foreseen. I went to see it with a friend, and halfway through, we walked out. My happy sheet would have been a zero. I didn’t find the narrative compelling, and the jokes didn’t land.
But that’s not the result of the movie.
The result is the box-office stats. The result is disapproval from the church, because it finds the film offensive to catholic and orthodox religions. The result is revealing the hypocrisy of the society in the movie’s aftermath. That friction created massive visibility, driving even more people to the theater and exponentially increasing the film’s value.
And it’s not necessarily something that can be measured directly. Nevertheless, the movie had a systemic impact on the market, regardless of whether individual viewers “enjoyed” the experience.
So, I’m thinking that L&D would like to have that kind of impact, make that shift. We need to stop obsessing over whether the audience enjoyed the seat time, and start measuring the box-office results of our training. Is the system moving the needle on revenue? Is it exposing operational inefficiencies? Is it driving the business forward?
The L&D Performance Measurement Myth: Beyond The Quantifiable
If learning is expected to deliver results, alignment and ownership must be defined upfront. However, this does not mean everything must be measured at any cost. As Dr. Serena Gonsalves-Fersch noted, a recurring problem in L&D is the assumption that if we cannot measure it, the learning hasn’t happened.
In reality, significant development occurs through observation: listening to a leader, witnessing work ethics in action, or networking with successful peers. Learning happens everywhere. The objective we are striving for is not just “measurement,” but strategic alignment with your specific business goals. As Gonsalves-Fersch continues, the industry tends to quantify learning by what has been “attended and consumed,” which is recognized as the point of the system’s failure.
If the alignment between learning and goals is something that you want to achieve, you need to take a step back and look at the wider picture, and not just a single aspect of learning (it being your subjective emotions, or someone’s gut feeling). By implementing a structured framework, leadership can govern the wider performance landscape rather than reacting to isolated training events. In such setting, learning will be memorable, seamless, and measurable in its quantifiable part.
The Intangible Core
Certain skills are the pillars of a high-performance environment, yet they defy simple quantification. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, the top five core skills are inherently human:
- 69% analytical thinking
- 67% resilience, flexibility, and agility
- 61% leadership and social influence
- 57% creative thinking
- 52% motivation and self-awareness (World Economic Forum)
A standard course rarely translates directly into increased self-awareness or creativity. Yet, these skills determine an organization’s success. This reality means that learning strategies cannot be copy-pasted; what works for one organization will not work for another.
All this means that L&D roles are plastic. The key is acknowledging that while some elements of growth are qualitative, the governed learning and performance system must be built on the part that is quantifiable—the one that is in its core aligned with the business. One is not more valuable than the other, but only one provides the predictability leadership requires.
You don’t have to measure the sitting time, nor collect satisfaction surveys. What you should do is establish a system which allows you to connect learning and training to business results.
The 2020s Dystopia
Exactly that. The data suggests we are stuck in a loop. ATD reports that 70% of organizations in 2024 still used employee satisfaction as their primary performance metric. In 2023 this was 67%. (ATD: 44) Furthermore, 75% of organizations still use learning hours to define success. (ATD: 51) These vanity metrics signal that happy sheets and seat time are still being mistaken for strategic impact.
How we frame all this is crucial, and check out the article “Money Spending or Money Making: What’s Your Learning Strategy Doing?” for more stats on the state of the industry.
The Measurement Myth from another source: 40% of companies still rely on training’s happy sheets to judge success in 2025, while only 8% actually use ROI metrics. (Voxy: 18) We must accept that while a portion of human growth is non-quantifiable, the investment itself must be governed.
Fortunately, there are frameworks available that allow C-level teams to finally see how learning drives the bottom line.
If you are tired of funding happy sheets and ready to demand predictable results, there is a better way. Contact eWyse to establish a system where learning is managed, measured, and owned at the executive level.
References:
Association for Talent Development (ATD). 2025 State of the Industry. May 2025.
Cardoz, Josh, and Pasterfield, Kate, host. “L&D as value creation center – with Dr. Serena Gonsalves-Fersch. Part I” The Unforgettable Learning Podcast, episode 18, Sponge, 5 September 2024, https://www.spongelearning.com/en/resources/podcast-l-d-as-value-creation-centre-with-dr-serena-gonsalves-fersch
Cardoz, Josh, and Pasterfield, Kate, host. “L&D as value creation center – with Dr. Serena Gonsalves-Fersch. Part I” The Unforgettable Learning Podcast, episode 19, Sponge, 12 September 2024, https://www.spongelearning.com/en/resources/podcast-recentering-the-human-in-modern-l-d-with-dr-serena-gonsalves-fersch
Voxy. 2025 Global L&D Benchmark Survey. January 2025.
World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2025. 7 January 2025. URL: https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/. Accessed on 9 February 2026.