The key element of learning with a significant Return on Investment is business impact. Delivering business impact requires an alignment of learning to the business: from the start of any – costly – learning endeavour.

Through business alignment I seek to establish a clear perception on the desired workplace performance and impact on key performance and result indicators. This is a business driven dialogue, with business leaders to establish outcome before building content.

This dialogue with the business is the single most important factor for the success of the learning interventions. It’s essential pre-work before building the learning architecture. Read more on my tried and tested approach in my forthcoming eBook.

Business alignment helps managers on all levels to gain an awareness of their business needs, but even more importantly their involvement and commitment is secured. This is invaluable during learning, when their managerial workplace support of the learners is required and – finally – when the impact of the learning needs to evaluated.

There is a consultative aspect to business alignment and ideally there is a predictive aspect as well. Yes, ROI can be predicted. Sometimes through something as simple as predicting that an on boarding period can be brought back from 18 months to half a year, increasing the fully productive job duration from half a year to 18 months. The prediction of the resulting financial business benefit secured the investment for the largest academy I was ever allowed to build.

ROI @ Work

In my day to day work I perform business needs assessments, draft ROI measurement plans and carry out ROI analysis and report on the results to the board. I work with top-tier vendors like ROI Navigator and Metrics that Matter.