Can leaders trust learning metrics?

Who doesn’t love a good metric? “Sales grew 12% this quarter.” “Our customer acquisition cost dropped three points last year.” “We need to boost our site’s domain authority ranking.” Whether it’s net profit/loss, keyword ranking, employee retention, cash flow, ROI, or churn or burn rate, scorecards like those tell us how we’re doing. The trouble is, numbers can lie. 

Or, at least, numbers can fail to tell the whole story.

This can be especially true when it comes to learning and development metrics. It’s tempting to consider completion, time and participation to be key indicators of employees’ learned skills, but those and other measures can create a false sense of confidence. Put plainly, participation is easy to measure. Capability is not — and that’s an important difference, because it can affect productivity.

According to a 2025 survey conducted by Training magazine, companies’ expenditures on employee training grew by nearly 5%, to almost $103 billion, from 2024 to 2025. That computes to an average of 13% of an organization’s budget spent on learning tools and technologies, or an investment of $874 per employee.

Clearly, the financial commitment to learning and development is there. The question is: Is the money invested translating into the skilled, prepared workers companies need? Even more to the point: Can people actually do the work?

Too often, the answer is no. While it’s easy to report and celebrate completion rates, course hours and engagement dashboards, these metrics reward activity but not necessarily the outcomes that are most important to businesses.

Put another way, on its own, training may not be filling the skills gaps in a workforce.

HR leaders are well acquainted with the world of benchmarks, from cost per hire, turnover rate and headcount to time to fill, internal mobility and absenteeism.

But gauging competence is typically much trickier. And because it’s harder, some organizations may default to what’s easiest to track rather than what’s most meaningful. Accurate assessment of employees’ capability should start with a clear definition of the skills needed and being taught, followed by observable demonstration of that knowledge on the job in ways that matter to the organization.

Most businesses are adept at identifying critical skills gaps (this is often the impetus for training in the first place), but many miss the opportunity to adopt a shared language for the skills in which employees are being trained. Investing in such a lexicon, however, would create alignment between learning investments and business performance, making it possible to measure whether training is closing real skills gaps, not just increasing course completions. What does that look like in action? A strong start might include creating skills-based job descriptions and mapping skills to each role, for instance.

Post-learning performance must also be evaluated based on consistent standards. Learning targets should do more than simply align with business goals; they should make clear how training directly contributes to the organization’s performance. Metrics like those don’t include, for example, learners’ satisfaction scores or attendance (though such measurements can be useful for other reasons). Similarly, self-reported surveys and dashboards after learning and development courses aren’t the best ways to evaluate capability. 

Instead, an organization needs supervisors and leaders who are ready and able to assess skills as they are applied day to day. This could mean tracking efficiency, met or missed deadlines, task time to completion, reduction in errors or other measurements of quality.

Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace 2025” report — the world’s largest ongoing study of “the employee experience” — found a decline in worker engagement, citing a lack of manager engagement as a primary cause. The report even put a price tag on the total cost of lost productivity to the world economy as a result: $438 billion. (On the flip side, Gallup estimated that “$9.6 trillion in productivity could be added to the economy if the global workforce was fully engaged.”)

Without a structure that includes a shared skill language, consistent standards for evaluating performance and engaged managers who can and will evaluate skills in real time, workers’ true capabilities will remain unclear and even invisible. 

When an organization can’t see whether training and development investments are working, the losses go well beyond the cost of the learning programs and employee time. Overestimating the readiness of workers leads to poor role placement, unjustified promotions and a blindness to skill gaps — until performance suffers. There’s no question that placing the wrong person in a job is expensive, whether the price tag is calculated in lost onboarding and training costs, low productivity or a negative impact on customers, culture or morale, among other consequences.

One of the biggest risks in a rapidly changing, technology-driven workplace is that an underskilled workforce won’t be able to mobilize quickly enough to respond to new and emerging business needs. In fact, frequent change is now so fundamental to work that leaders are being called on to “routine-ize” it, making change a natural part of our workday and helping staff to build their “change reflexes.” The new reality of work’s fundamental fluidity means that simply stating “everyone completed the training” is a potentially dangerous blind spot that leaders can’t afford to fall back on.

Choosing candidates based on their skills and competencies as opposed to traditional qualifications such as education — what’s known as “skills-based hiring” — has its proponents. But just as assessing an employee’s capability can be challenging, so is evaluating that of a given applicant. Measuring skills — both hard and soft — can be complex and resource intensive, but without clear definitions and evaluation standards, organizations risk inconsistency in both hiring and development.  

That’s why it’s so critical that the skills needed for a specific role are clearly defined and understood. Similarly, when a manager is prepared to apply consistent evaluation standards in observing an employee’s performance — or evaluating a candidate — they can assess competency in concrete terms.

The bottom line is that when skills are defined and evaluation is clear and connected to business outcomes, learning metrics are attached to something substantive and meaningful. And that translates to learning systems that can answer the question that matters most to HR leaders: Can your employees do the work you need them to do? 

University of Phoenix can help build a skills backbone for your organization that can align learning investments with workforce capability. From clarifying role-based skills requirements to identifying and addressing gaps, these solutions can help leaders connect development efforts to measurable performance outcomes. Learn more about building a stronger skills foundation for your organization.