The Learning & Development (L&D) industry is a $400 billion market flooded with endless buzzwords, trend reports, and shiny new tools. Yet, despite billions spent every year, organizations still struggle to prove whether their training programs actually move the needle.
As Noah Rabinowitz, Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry, points out, we belong to an industry that is “rich in solutions, poor in definition.”
In his hard-hitting SPARK TALENT keynote session, Rabinowitz argues that the L&D industry is efficient at designing and selling solutions, but notoriously bad at defining the problems it’s trying to solve.
Here are the top five takeaways from his talk on how to break the cycle of vanity metrics and start driving real business performance.
1. Activity is Never the Same as Progress
Completion rates, high star ratings, and glowing fedback surveys might look great on a slide deck, but they don’t mean employees actually learned anything useful. Liking a course isn’t proof that a skill improved.
“Activity on a skill gap is never the same as progress. Activity can never be considered progress… because if I did training and nothing changes, but the people liked it and thought it was valuable, did create any value for the organization? No, i destroyed value. I actually consumed resources and produced no tangible positive output.”
True process is measured strictly by whether a specific skill gap was narrowed, not by how many people gave a session a thumbs-up.
2. The “Gap” is the Only Truth
Every serious L&D initiative must start with a clearly defined gap between current behavior (the numerator) and target performance (the denominator). Vague goals like “our leaders need better executive presence” or “employees should use AI responsibly” are untrainable and unmeasurable.
“A problem is never the absence of a course, a platform, a capability model, a workshop, or a new technology. A problem is only the gap between the current state and the desired future state… What I think is most important for L&D professionals is becoming great at diagnosing gaps. That is the core of what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Instead of chasing vague buzzwords, standards must be described in observable specific terms like what you would see if you were following an employee around with a video camera.
3. If a Napkin Closes the Gap, Use the Napkin
Sophistication is not a standard. An expensive platform, complex simulation, or AI bit isn’t automatically better at closing a gap than a simple, cheap intervention.
“If a napkin closes the gap faster, give me the napkin. The test is the gap, not the tooling… If a five-minute sketch gets someone to proficiency faster and cheaper than a platform, a library, a taxonomy, a framework, a model, a tool or a simulation then the sketch on the napkin is the best solution, and the platform is just a more expensive way to be slower.”
Don’t buy sophistication for the sake of it, buy the fastest, cheapest path to verified capability.
4. Not Every Business Problem is a Learning Problem
Before rolling out new training, check the environment. As performance consulting pioneer Gerry Rummler famously noted: “Put a good person up against a bad process, and the bad process will win every time.”
“Not every business problem is a capability problem,” Rabinowitz explained. “A lof of the time, almost all of the time, there’s also a conditions gap… If there’s a conditions gap at work, we can do as much as we possibly can, and the numerator and denominator delta never move.”
If an employee isn’t performing, it’s often due to broken tools, poor systems, confusing approval layers, or conflicting incentives. No amount of training can fix a process flaw.
5. Calculate the Real Cost: Employee Time
When measuring the return on investment (ROI) for a program, licensing fees and vendor bills are only a fraction of the cost. The biggest investment by far is employee payroll time spent away from their core work.
“The biggest investment, and the one that we typically don’t calculate into our ROI models as rigorously as we should, is time. Once I calculate the hard costs and the value of the time, now I can actually tell business leaders: ‘Closing ten points of our new capability gap is going to cost $17 million in employee payroll time plus $3 million in hard costs. Should we do it?’ That’s the way every other business decision gets made in a company.”
To gain executive credibility, L&D leaders must present clear financial trade-offs based on hard costs and employee hours.
By shifting focus away from shiny tech and toward precise gap anaylsis, L&D leaders can stop managing activities and start delivering undeniable business value.