Ryan Austin is Founder and CEO of Cognota, helping professionals learn how to run L&D like a business.
Many L&D leaders build strategies. Few connect them to real business results.
Too often, learning strategies are thoughtful and well-organized—aligned with talent models, yes, but not with business objectives. They live in presentations, not in practice. And without measurable goals defined in partnership with business leaders, they struggle to gain traction or deliver impact.
Training still happens. Budgets still get spent. But the outcomes rarely move the needle on what the business actually cares about. As a result, L&D risks becoming a well-intentioned function that’s busy, but not necessarily effective.
Strategy Without Business Alignment Is Just Activity
Recent industry research from my company’s 2024 LearnOps® Trends & Insights Report shows only 18% of L&D leaders say their teams are viewed as strategic partners. Meanwhile, nearly half report that business priorities heavily influence their learning investments.
The disconnect, I believe, is that strategy is rarely operationalized. L&D teams then get stuck in a reactive mode—responding to training requests, building courses and launching programs without a clear link to broader organizational priorities like productivity, customer retention or digital transformation.
That gap between intention and execution is where strategies lose momentum—or worse, become irrelevant. This is not just a measurement issue. It’s a planning issue. Without aligning learning initiatives to business outcomes from the outset, there’s no clear path to ROI—only activity.
Strategy Has to Live Where Decisions Are Made
Operationalizing L&D strategy starts at the beginning—by designing programs with the business, not just for them. One of the biggest shifts we’re seeing among high-performing L&D teams is a move toward operationalizing strategy through structured processes and systems—an approach often referred to as learning operations (LearnOps).
Take the case of a global logistics company we worked with to make strategy a living, breathing part of daily work. The real shift came when they started co-designing objectives with their business stakeholders during the intake and planning stage.
By embedding strategic goals into intake and planning, vague aims like “improve onboarding” were replaced with measurable outcomes—reducing time-to-productivity and improving safety scores or successful tech adoption. Every request was assessed not only for learning needs but also for business impact potential.
Once launched, the team didn’t wait for post-training surveys to gauge success. They tracked time-to-market, resource allocation and alignment to strategic priorities as early indicators of effectiveness. Within two quarters, they reallocated 30% of their resources away from low-impact initiatives and had the operational data to show exactly where they were moving the needle.
From Strategy To System: Three Steps To Drive Impact
To move from strategy to sustained business value, L&D leaders should rethink how strategy is built, delivered and measured:
1. Partner early with the business to set clear objectives: Every major learning initiative should begin with a joint planning session—not just to understand business needs but also to co-design what success looks like. This means aligning on the organizational priorities the program supports, the workforce capabilities required and the specific business metrics the program will influence.
Ask the right questions upfront: What strategic goal does this program support? What skills or behaviors must change? How will we measure success—and when?
By collaborating early, L&D leaders can ensure learning objectives are not just educational, but operational—anchored to KPIs like increased productivity, reduced time to proficiency or accelerated product rollout. This partnership also ensures shared accountability for outcomes, which is essential for credibility and long-term impact.
2. Track operational metrics as leading indicators of ROI: Don’t wait for training to finish before assessing value. L&D teams should use operational data throughout the learning lifecycle to track alignment and efficiency. Key indicator examples include:
• Time-to-market for new programs.
• Alignment of training requests to strategy.
• Utilization of team capacity and resources.
• Percentage of training tied to business priorities.
These metrics signal whether your L&D function is working on the right things—and doing so with the speed and efficiency today’s business environment demands.
3. Use operational data to continuously improve performance: Rather than relying solely on lagging indicators like post-training assessments or annual ROI analysis, L&D teams should treat operational data as a feedback loop. Intake analytics, program effectiveness and resource tracking enable teams to optimize project pipelines, redirect efforts to higher-impact initiatives, and make informed decisions faster.
By integrating this continuous improvement cycle into the strategy execution process, leaders can ensure L&D becomes a dynamic partner in achieving business goals—backed by real-time data and strategic foresight.
Final Thought
A learning strategy isn’t just a plan—it’s a system. And systems only work when they are embedded in how your team operates every day.
When strategy is co-created with the business, tied to measurable goals and tracked with operational data, it stops being a static plan. It becomes a dynamic driver of business performance. That’s when learning becomes not just strategic—but indispensable.
And that’s how learning earns its seat at the table.
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