Let’s face it: when it comes to allocating funds or making budget cuts, at many organizations, learning and development often gets the short end of the stick. So how can you make the value of learning hard to overlook?
I sat down with the two AdventHealth speakers from our Communicating L&D Impact Online Conference to get their advice on conveying learning’s ROI to business leaders. Check out the real-life examples from Amy Colasanti, Learning Alignment Supervisor, and Natasha McIlmurray, Learning Quality Assurance Specialist:
Q: How did you get started in learning and development?
Amy: I started working in the Florida public school system with special needs students and in mathematics. As I continued in my L&D career, I found that the most beneficial thing for me was statistics. Anytime I could provide data to back decision-making and better student learning was a game-changer.
So my entire career, from the school system for 18 years and even with AdventHealth now, has been that age-old question of how do you measure learning versus how do you measure compliance? And that is something that I am very passionate about.
Natasha: Like many people in learning and development, I found my way into the field by accident. During grad school, I completed my field study project at our local certified rape crisis center and was offered a full-time role leading violence prevention education. I was designing and assessing learning experiences, facilitating difficult conversations on sensitive topics, and managing community education programs, all without realizing that there was actually a name for this work.
So, when I discovered that what I was doing was part of an entire professional field, I was excited to just lean into it and learn. It gave language to something that I already cared about, which was using learning as a tool for awareness, growth, and meaningful change. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to apply some of those same principles in different industries, in higher education, in the mental health field, and now here in corporate healthcare at AdventHealth.
Amy: Hearing Natasha say that, I have to say I did not go into the L&D field intentionally. It was also just a happy accident when I started in L&D. I didn’t know what to do, and I started working with children, and then I really liked it.
Q: What advice do you have for L&D professionals who are looking to communicate the impact of their learning to the rest of the business?
Amy: For anyone that’s in the L&D profession, a lot of times you can get analysis paralysis when you start to look at some of the numbers, especially if your brain doesn’t immediately go to being able to tell a story with the numbers. But a lot of it is about being able to determine what’s going to make the most impact with the folks that you’re talking to, what are those key performance indicators that you can tie in, and what’s going to move the needle for your organization. Your department, your immediate supervisor, whoever you happen to be working with, needs to know what the end goal is so that you’re able to work on building a sustainable model on the L&D side. That lends itself to being a benefit and value add, as opposed to something that’s detracting from the company, department, or organization.
Natasha: For me, the question about communicating impact really goes back to the way in which we communicate, especially learning to communicate with a steady confidence in this space. As in any industry, we often understand our work at a depth that others just may not, which means that we’re in many ways the subject matter experts on how learning drives performance and ROI. But that expertise alone isn’t enough. The way that we communicate our impact matters just as much as the work itself.
There’s something about knowing your audience, being able to speak in terms of business outcomes, not just learning activities or initiatives that you’re doing right. We need to connect those initiatives and activities to priorities that leaders already care about. So, we’re translating learning into a business language. We’re translating learning into the language of strategy and performance, and when we’re doing that, our value becomes a lot harder to overlook.
Amy: Very well said.
Natasha: What’s the first thing that goes when budgets get cut? Learning. If we had the ability to speak the language of business and understand how our learning impacts and elevates business. It’s way harder to look past us as a profession in general.
Amy: It’s really hard for a lot of L&D professionals who are first coming in to convey how much learning is going to elevate the business, especially when everything seems just fine, it’s status quo. But you have to be able to emphasize and expand upon what you’re going to make, so it’s not just status quo.
Like Natasha said, when you’re going around the table and talking about money, they’re asking, “Are we really getting a return on our investment when it comes to learning?” And it can be really scary if you’re not asking the important questions like “we are doing okay right now, but how much better could we be doing if we focus just the smallest amount of attention on the development of the people that are in the org at the moment?” But it doesn’t have to be scary when you know the impact of what learning can do.
It all comes back to knowing what the goals of your organization, your department, and your company are. Then you can make sure that what you’re talking about has relevance. I use analogies a lot to relate to the other people in the room when I’m having these conversations. If I’m able to relate something to a sporting event because I know that the person I’m talking to is a sports fan, they’re going to grasp the concept so much quicker, and it’s going to be so much easier to start having those conversations.
Natasha: Yes, she’s the analogy queen.
Q: What’s your favorite part of your current role?
Natasha: The favorite part of my current role has been gaining a deeper appreciation for the “back end” of learning and development. So much of my early career was forward-facing. It was facilitation, it was directly engaging with learners, it was leading live learning experiences, and it was leadership development.
In this role, I’ve had the opportunity to really strengthen my understanding of learning management systems, digital instruction, and the technical architecture that makes learning scalable and sustainable at AdventHealth. I’ve been able to take part in strategizing and operationalizing to expand my skill set to better understand the infrastructure that supports great learning.
Amy: I’m so happy to hear all of those words. I absolutely love building frameworks, scaffolding, and efficient processes. In the role I have now, I’m starting from the ground up and creating something that has never existed before. We’re pulling together all of the what-ifs and tying them down so we can make learning efficient for our organization.
It’s so exciting to be able to see the plans start to come together and know that 10, 15, 30 years down the road, our learning is efficient as an organization because of the architecture, structure, and scaffolding that we built. I love being able to create a solid structure and foundation to build on.
Natasha: Our leadership quite often talks about legacy work and what Amy was just describing is exactly that – the foundational work that will establish the systems, standards, and structures future teams with inherit, maintain, and evolve. We are currently in the trenches with a lot of this work, but it is truly legacy work that is going to allow learners at AdventHealth in 5, 10, 15, and 30 years to experience really great learning and potentially, over time, embrace the changes and the differences that learning has in their specific role.
Q: What’s the most challenging part of your current role?
Amy: It’s the same piece as my favorite part of the role. It’s building something that didn’t exist before, so it’s a lot of trial and error. I love the process side of things, but in building that process, there are so many ups and downs. You have some days where you plateau, some days where you really peak, and then you have those valleys. I think those valleys are actually my favorite part. I like to fail because I know that I’m going to learn something from that failure, and then I can move in a different direction. You can always choose another direction if the first option doesn’t work. So even though it’s the most challenging part, it’s still my favorite part.
Natasha: I have a little bit of a different take. But, like Amy, the most challenging part is closely connected to what I enjoy most. I intentionally stepped into this position knowing that it would stretch me. As learning professionals, we know growth rarely happens without discomfort. The challenge has been both demanding and super rewarding. But overall, it reinforces the importance of modeling the learning mindset that we advocate for others.
Q: Without giving too much of a spoiler, what can attendees expect from your session at the online conference?
Natasha: Attendees can expect a practical, behind-the-scenes look at how we’re building this framework to measure the impact of digital learning at AdventHealth. Without overcomplicating the process, we’re going to be walking through how we’re answering some critical leadership questions: Are people actually learning? Are we being financially responsible? Is learning intentionally connected to already existing business priorities? We’re going to share lots of lessons learned in this process, some practical first steps for exploring learning impact in their space, and how to speak about these learning metrics to their stakeholders.
Amy: I think the scariest part for a lot of folks who are in L&D who aren’t as metrics-focused is the math. But, as I said earlier, when you can tell a story with hard data points and milestones, you bring everyone together full circle. You can’t argue with the number. The number’s the number. You might be able to argue with the story, but you can’t argue with the number.
