Have you heard about the responsibilities of an L&D leader?
The sad truth about training program statistics in 2025: 75% of leaders who feel their programs are ineffective are simply wasting money. The gains will come from the 8% who move beyond satisfaction surveys to ROI governance and turn cost centers into performance systems (ATDs). This means that company leaders (perhaps even the leaders of your company!) are ready to spend money, but not invest. Does it really make sense to anyone?
At a time when we are struggling to justify the effectiveness of humans over AI, it is dangerous to read statistics that fail to account for the vast pools of money spent on L&D leadership. Because, if so, what is their purpose? This is also dangerous for the profession. We have to talk about effectiveness and the responsibility of L&D leaders.
If your organization is participating in the $400 billion in global spending on the L&D spending landscape, who owns the results? Is it the vendor delivering the “engaging” video, or is it a leader-managed system that ensures predictability?
Money-making strategies treat learning as a means of performance, where ROI is visible, measurable, and most importantly expected before the first dollar is allocated. In this respect, a responsible leader is one who is ready to show and own the consequences of his actions.
Intelligence vs. Assumptions
As we move into the second half of this decade, it is heartening to note that a number of global economic crises have revealed that people are our most valuable asset. This means that companies are not afraid to invest in their L&D departments. In addition, capital allocation has increased from 2024 (Freifeld).
True leadership is based on the premise that developing human capital is the only way to drive business and achieve growth. That’s amazing! But why do we read that out of the green pool being poured into L&D, only the poor 8% are realizing real, real ROI? Basically, on the one hand, you have the big spenders who rely on creating content at all costs and measure its “effectiveness” with post-training surveys (and those at the top clearly suffer from a lack of accountability). Meanwhile, L&D money makers are moving to a paradigm that uses intelligence to support leadership decisions. Evidence supports that these L&D professionals are not just creating content, they are leveraging the business environment.
To confirm the above, let’s look at some data from the global L&D spending landscape. Global estimates vary depending on the source, but the US market serves as the main bellwether of corporate spending trends.
2023: $101.8 billion spent in the U.S. / estimated global market ~$370 billion (Freifeld, 2023) 2024: $98 billion spent in the U.S. / estimated global market ~$385 billion (Freifeld, 2024) 2025 forecast: $102.8 billion spent in the U.S. / estimated global market ~$400.7 billion (Freifeld, 2024) 2025) (MRA)
Over the past five years, corporate training spending has grown to a $400 billion global industry. In 2022 alone, U.S. companies surpassed the $100 billion cap (Freifeld). But here’s the ironic reality for executives. Most of that capital was spent on activities rather than performance. If you spend $100 billion without a strategic agenda or managed systems, that’s not an investment. You are just compensating for the lack of accountability.
The small drop in spending we saw in 2024 was not a retreat from learning. It was a correction. Executives began to question “budget drift,” the trend of rising L&D costs while business outcomes remained anecdotal. Of course, this is just one way to read it, but it makes sense at this point. Companies need a good reason to invest. In short, allocating capital to learning departments (L&D) requires performance.
For organizations that want to make money, it’s important to treat learning as a means of performance. They define what success looks like and who owns the results even before the first dollar of $100 billion is allocated, starting with adjusting outcome measures, not just training efforts.
There are measurable learning outcomes.
The term learning strategy has a unique meaning. It is not a training effort, nor is it learning for that purpose. The development of learning strategies is the result of a controlled system.
What we need to remember is that strategy comes from the language of war. At its core, it is a plan to survive, overcome, and overturn. This is based on a set of detected issues (yes, problems, not challenges!) and data. The essence of strategy, which comes from Greek, is complete visibility. That is, auditing an organization’s ability to consider all variables, define strategic courses of action, and ensure predictable results (Nadar). So, basically, strategy is something that extends to all levels of an organization.
You may be wondering why I say this. The answer is that before you can prepare a strategy, you need to take a series of actions. And that’s when collaboration between L&D and management becomes critical.
Some people call this different names, but I call it Outcome Evaluation Adjustment (REA). No matter what the acronym is, the principles are the same. Measurable learning outcomes are not a byproduct of strategy. They are its foundation.
In a spending culture, measurement is an afterthought, a “smile sheet” or completion rate collected after the budget has been spent. Money-making strategies reverse the order. We don’t ask, “What do I need to learn?” Until the answer is “Which business levers do I need to move?”
In other words, and hopefully more clearly, I’ll show you one of the scenarios where you spend your money. Organizations begin with a recognized need for leadership training. They buy content, deploy it, and then ask, “Did it work?” This is actual budget drift. This is a hopeful expense, not a strategy.
If a “strategy” requires full visibility, a learning strategy must have a defined return on expected return (ROE) before an hour of development is recorded. You don’t want your L&D department and the money invested in it to become a black box.
So how can you actually achieve this? There are three key steps to building a learning strategy that delivers solid and measurable business performance.
First, identify specific points of friction in your business (such as slow sales cycles, high error rates in manufacturing, or broken management decisions) and anchor your learning system directly to those points. Second, treat evaluation as a structural requirement. This is critical because once success criteria are built into the initial design, the learning process becomes a controlled system. This allows leadership to move away from assumptions and aim for intelligence. Third, share responsibility for outcomes. In a managed system, responsibility for results does not rest solely with the L&D department or external partners. It is co-owned by a leadership team that defines business priorities. Learning is no longer a “black box” expense when outcomes are measurable and transparent. This becomes a predictable performance lever that the board can actually see, manage, and scale.
Its three core stages are the pillars of eWyse’s business and learning performance system. By defining what success looks like and how it will be audited before any action is taken, organizations eliminate ambiguity that leads to wasted investments.
Conclusion: Hope is not a business strategy
If you can’t draw a straight line from your L&D budget to performance, you’re managing endowments. Still, you probably want to manage a strategy that includes return on investment (ROI) or expected return instead. To help clarify these metrics, eWyse CEO Mario Buljan and Director of Strategy and Human Resources Sanja Damiani recorded an in-depth session on closing the gap between ROI and ROE for your leadership team.
The $400 billion spent on learning worldwide is proof that organizations have the capital and the intent to grow. However, intentions without governance lead to budget fluctuations. Shifts that make money don’t require any “further” training. It requires discipline to stop treating learning as a black box and start treating it as a managed business system.
Defining outcomes before action eliminates gambling. Stop expecting results and start expecting results. In 2026, competitive advantage will not be given to companies that spend the most, but to executives who can see exactly how their investments are impacting their investments. govern.
References:
Human Resource Development Association. The state of the industry in 2025. May 2025.
Freifeldt, Lori. “2022 Training Industry Report”. Training Magazine, November 16, 2022, trainingmag.com/2022-training-industry-report/. Accessed February 2, 2026.
Freifeldt, Lori. “2023 Training Industry Report”. Training Magazine, November 14, 2023, trainingmag.com/2023-training-industry-report/. Accessed February 2, 2026.
Freifeldt, Lori. “2024 Training Industry Report”. Training Magazine, November 20, 2024, trainingmag.com/2024-training-industry-report/. Accessed February 2, 2026.
Freifeldt, Lori. “2025 Training Industry Report”. Training Magazine, November 10, 2025, trainingmag.com/2025-training-industry-report/. Accessed February 2, 2026.
Market report analysis. Market Deep Dive: Explore the global corporate workforce development training market trends from 2025 to 2033. January 10, 2026, www.marketreportanalytics.com/reports/global-corporate-workforce-development-training-market-5563. Accessed February 2, 2026.
Nadar, Jackson. “The origin of strategy”. Medium, June 2, 2016, medium.com/@jack_nadar/the-etymology-of-strategy-4e8035c8f497. Accessed February 3, 2026.
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