In order to help find a way forward, LEO recently held a workshop at the Royal Institution in London at which expert speakers and L&D professionals from thirty organisations came together in an attempt to solve the learning-analytics puzzle. The event was facilitated by LEO’s Product Development Director, Gareth Jones, who introduced the key speakers:

• LEO’s Chief Strategy Officer, Piers Lea
• Andy Lancaster, Head of Learning and Development Content at the CIPD
• L&D and procurement expert Heather Scothern
• Mike Rustici, founder and CEO of analytics specialists Watershed

"Although many in the room said measuring business impact was difficult, they also felt that the time was right to tackle it and welcomed the opportunity to address the challenge of the session: to design a business-impact strategy that is sustainable," said Lea. "Our ongoing LEO research into the subject of measuring learning impact shows an overwhelming desire for learning and development to use analytics to improve its output; there are, though, a number of obstacles getting in the way."

The guests and experts shared their success stories, discussed their obstacles around measuring learning impact, and debated potential solutions in an open, collaborative environment. "The feeling from the room is that it’s tough to get started, but it’s more important to start – even if it’s taking a number of small steps. The answer to creating a sustainable measuring impact strategy lies in taking a big-data approach, and you can’t do this unless you start collecting data. The requirement is to set a strategy and then get on with it", Lea added. "As an industry, we are now a lot closer to tackling this than we were a few years ago."

The wisdom of the room has been collected and is available as a free insight document detailing the ten key components you need to get started with measuring the business impact of learning.