ATD’s 2026 State of the Industry report, sponsored by Zensai, recently found that only 13% of organizations measure Return On Investment (ROI) across all their workplace learning programs. And more than half don’t measure it at all. So, unless you’re part of the 13%, it’s time to reconsider how you identify and prove the benefits of training for your business.
The last time we discussed this particular ATD report, we examined how organizations can make established training time more impactful in the face of shrinking budgets. Now, let’s look at how you’ll prove that impact to your senior leadership.
How do organizations measure training effectiveness?
When learning and development (L&D) teams want to prove training works, most reach for employee satisfaction first. According to ATD, 57% of organizations measure it across all their learning programs. Employee acquisition of skills or knowledge takes second place, at 37%.
Even achievement of organizational goals sat at just 20% across all learning programs, despite being one of the clearest indicators for the business benefits of training alongside ROI. And with only one outcome used consistently by the majority of organizations, there are clearly major discrepancies in how employers track training impact.
The gap between these activity metrics and genuine business impact is where return on investment comes in. ROI directly connects training spend to financial outcomes, and calculating it is simpler than most L&D teams assume.
The standard formula is:
ROI (%) = ((Monetary benefits of training – Cost of training) / Cost of training) × 100
Say your organization runs a sales training program that costs $50,000. Over the following quarter, participants generate $200,000 in additional revenue compared to a control group. Your ROI is (($200,000 – $50,000) / $50,000) × 100 = 300%. That’s the kind of number a CFO pays attention to.
The real challenge is isolating the monetary benefits. Start by identifying the business metric the training is designed to move, whether that’s revenue per rep or time to competency. Then compare performance before and after, controlling for other variables where you can. Even a conservative estimate gives your C-suite something satisfaction scores never will: a financial case they can act on.
Why won’t satisfaction prove the benefits of training?
Most L&D teams already know employee satisfaction is a weak proxy for training quality. The deeper problem is that it’s actively misleading. A course can feel polished, well-paced, relevant in the moment, and full of practical exercises, and still be completely irrelevant to someone’s role. Satisfaction scores won’t catch that. They reward the experience, not the outcome. And because high satisfaction feels like validation, it can quietly discourage teams from digging deeper into whether the training actually changed anything.
Skill acquisition is a better indicator, but it still has a limitation. Knowing that employees learned something new doesn’t tell you whether it matters to the business. There’s no sense in teaching lawyers to run a car wash, for instance. But, if you solely relied on skill acquisition metrics, it would seem like a great investment.
While this won’t be intentional on the part of employers, ATD’s findings almost make it seem like they’re less likely to measure a given outcome the more effective it would actually be.
The consequences of ignoring ROI
Along with the achievement of organizational goals, return on investment is one of the clearest and most objective ways of determining if training investment actually benefits your company. After all, it’s hard to get much clearer than “you spent X but only made Y.”
You can’t measure the financial benefits of training without return on investment, much less convince your C-suite to allocate you further resources. And this can have a couple of different consequences:
Increased budget pressure
Ignoring ROI means you’re operating in the dark when it comes to the potential profitability of investing in L&D. As a result, senior leaders are unlikely to expand your L&D budget.
ATD’s data makes the scale of this visible: the average L&D investment per employee fell from $1,254 in 2024 to $846 in 2025, even as average learning time increased by three hours. Organizations are spending less per person but asking for more learning time. Without ROI data, L&D teams have no way to argue that this trajectory is unsustainable.
Lack of credibility
No matter how promising a new learning program is, C-suite and L&D decision-makers won’t back it without ROI data. Good ideas get postponed, not because they lack potential, but because there’s no financial business case behind them.
Over time, this creates a compounding problem. When L&D teams consistently pitch without ROI data, decision-makers stop expecting it, and start treating every proposal as a financial risk by default. The way to break that cycle is to factor ROI into all learning programs, not just the ones under scrutiny. That signals fiscal awareness, and senior leaders are far more likely to trust you on ambitious proposals when you’ve already proven you track what matters.
Why measure outcomes and performance?
Even the KPIs that look like outcomes, such as engagement or retention, are too broad to attribute to training alone. Everything else is just activity data dressed up as evidence.
The real question is whether your training is changing anything. On the performance side, connecting learning to review conversations and goal updates means you can see its impact in real time. If there’s no meaningful difference before and after, it’s time to rethink your approach.
Too often, learning sits isolated from performance and engagement metrics. That’s why so few organizations can demonstrate the benefits of training through return on investment. Unifying learning, engagement, and performance is how you achieve what we call Human Success. When these three areas feed into each other, you can trace the impact of training through goal progress and engagement trends that connect back to business results, not just course completions.
Only ROI can confirm the business benefits of training
Before you start dismantling your learning programs entirely, be aware that there may not be anything wrong with them. The issue is that you don’t know. And that uncertainty is exactly what makes the case for return on investment so urgent.
Start by connecting training data to the metrics your leadership already cares about: goal progress, performance trends, skill gap closure, and business results. When you can show that a learning program contributed to a measurable business outcome, you’re no longer asking for trust. You’re presenting evidence. Once you know which programs are contributing and which ones are stalling, you can decide what stays, what goes, what gets redesigned, and where to invest next. That’s a fundamentally different conversation to have with your C-suite, and the clearest way to prove the benefits of training for your organization.
If you’re interested in seeing ATD’s full data set, then we recommend reading their entire 2026 State of the Industry report for yourself.