L&D is obsessed with certain emotions
You’re not the only business owner who has approved a learning budget based on “emotion.” However, you may be at risk.
For decades, the industry has relied on the ultimate oxymoron: the happy seat of training. If your employees enjoy their “training sessions,” the coffee is hot, and your lunch caterer can provide the perfect meal for each attendee, I hear your investment is a success. But satisfaction is not a business metric.
In fact, relying on vanity metrics is a clear sign that your organization is simply managing budget spending and not a business performance system.
so what are you doing? Are you simply spending your learning budget?
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Movies, Statistics, L&D
Training happy sheets are helpful to some extent, but they don’t deliver results. They are emotions.
To understand the difference, let’s take a quick analogy from the real world Croats (yes, we’ve been around since the 7th century, look it up).
I believe that art evokes reactions, passion, and emotion. A work of art can make a real impact and stay with you for days, making you think about it. For the sake of analogy, let’s agree on these postulates.
Recently, a very commercial domestic comedy was released in Croatia. For a country whose film industry is at least 50 times smaller than the US’s, this is a really big deal. For comparison, Croatia’s most successful film of all time accounts for less than 0.5% of the domestic revenue of a major U.S. blockbuster. The annual box office revenue for Croatia as a whole (all films total around $20-26 million) is less than the opening weekend gross of a single Hollywood blockbuster in the U.S. market.
Oh, this movie is the most successful movie ever. Ha!
Anyway, this is the most successful box office film in Croatian history. PR is relentless. It’s epic, amazing, and there’s already a sequel planned. I went to see it with a friend, but we ended up leaving halfway through. My happy seat would have been zero. The story wasn’t convincing, and the jokes didn’t work either.
But that’s not the result of the movie.
The result is box office results. As a result, the church disapproved the film as an attack on Catholicism and Orthodoxy. As a result, society’s hypocrisy was exposed in the aftermath of the film. This friction created great publicity, brought more people to theaters, and dramatically increased the film’s value.
And it’s not always something that can be measured directly. Nevertheless, the film had a systemic impact on the market, whether or not individual viewers “enjoyed” the experience.
So L&D wants to have that kind of impact and make that kind of change happen. We need to stop worrying about whether the audience enjoyed their seat time and start measuring the box office performance of our training. Is the system making a significant difference to the bottom line? Is it exposing operational inefficiencies? Is it moving the business forward?
The myths of L&D performance measurement: Beyond the limits of quantification
If learning is expected to yield results, alignment and ownership must be defined up front. However, this does not mean that you need to measure everything at all costs. As Dr. Serena Gonsalves-Fersch pointed out, a recurring problem in L&D is the assumption that if it can’t be measured, it’s not learning.
In reality, great growth happens through observation: listening to leaders, witnessing work ethics in action, and networking with successful peers. Learning happens everywhere. Our goal is not just to “measure,” but to strategically align with your specific business goals. As Gonsalves-Fersch continues, the industry tends to quantify learning in terms of content “taken and consumed,” which is recognized as a point of failure in the system.
If we want to achieve learning-goal alignment, we need to take a step back and look at a broader picture than just one aspect of learning (such as subjective feelings or someone’s intuition). By implementing a structured framework, leaders can manage the broader performance environment rather than reacting to individual training events. In such an environment, learning is memorable, seamless, and measurable in quantifiable parts.
intangible core
Certain skills are pillars of high-performance environments, but are difficult to quantify simply. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Employment Report, 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)
Standard courses rarely lead directly to increased self-awareness or creativity. However, these skills determine the success of an organization. This reality means that learning strategies cannot be copied and pasted. What works in one organization will not work in another.
All of this means that the L&D role is flexible. It’s important to recognize that while some elements of growth are qualitative, managed learning and performance systems need to be built on quantifiable parts – core parts that align with the business. One is not more valuable than the other, but only one can provide the predictability that leaders need.
There’s no need to measure sitting time or collect satisfaction surveys. What we need to do is build a system that links learning and training to business performance.
2020s dystopia
That’s exactly right. The data suggests we are stuck in a loop. ATD reports that in 2024, 70% of organizations will still use employee satisfaction as a key performance indicator. In 2023, this was 67%. (ATD: 44) Furthermore, 75% of organizations still use learning time to define success. (ATD: 51) These vanity metrics show that happy seats and seat time are still being mistaken for strategic influence.
How you put all this together is very important. Check out the article “Spending Money or Making Money: What’s Your Study Strategy?” Click here for detailed statistics on the current state of the industry.
Measurement myth from another source: 40% of companies are still relying on training happy sheets to determine success in 2025, but only 8% are actually using ROI metrics. (Voxy: 18) We must accept that while some parts of human growth cannot be quantified, the investment itself must be managed.
Fortunately, frameworks are available that allow C-level teams to finally see how learning drives revenue.
If you’re tired of funding happy seats and are ready for predictable results, there’s a better way. Contact eWyse to establish a system to manage, measure, and own learning at the executive level.
References:
Association for Talent Development (ATD). The state of the industry in 2025. May 2025.
Josh’s Cards and host Pastorfield’s Kate. “L&D as a value creation center – with Dr. Serena Gonsalves-Fersch. Part I” The Unforgettable Learning Podcast, Episode 18, Sponge, September 5, 2024, https://www.spongelearning.com/en/resources/podcast-ld-as-value-creation-centre-with-dr-serena-gonsalves-fersch
Josh’s Cards and host Pastorfield’s Kate. “L&D as a value creation center – with Dr. Serena Gonsalves-Fersch. Part I,” The Unforgettable Learning Podcast, Episode 19, Sponge, September 12, 2024, https://www.spongelearning.com/en/resources/podcast-recentering-the-human-in-modern-ld-with-dr-serena-gonsalves-fersch
Voxy. 2025 Global L&D Benchmark Survey. January 2025.
World Economic Forum. “The Future of Jobs Report 2025”. January 7, 2025. URL: https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/. Accessed February 9, 2026.
Ewise
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