Employers spend millions on learning and development each year, yet Brandon Hall Group™ research reveals a startling reality: over 25% of learning never translates into actual workplace performance. This “scrap learning” represents a significant loss of resources and potential impact, with more than 25 cents of every training dollar essentially wasted because it never translates into workplace performance.
Research highlights a fundamental disconnect between learning investment and business impact. Many L&D teams still operate as service providers rather than strategic business partners, struggling to demonstrate how their programs contribute to organizational goals.
Explorance’s Metrics That Matter solution bridges this gap by providing measurement tools that help learning professionals demonstrate real business impact from their programs.
The Blended Learning Reality
The research presented during a recent Explorance webinar confirms what many L&D professionals already recognize: blended learning approaches have become standard practice. A poll of webinar attendees showed that 88% currently use blended learning, with most dedicating up to 75% of their training mix to blended approaches.
This shift reflects several key drivers:
- The pandemic’s acceleration of digital learning adoption
- Technological innovations making blended learning more accessible and cost-effective
- Learner preferences for flexibility and varied modalities
- The recognized benefits of experiential and application-based learning
The modern learning ecosystem now balances formal (38%), informal (29%), and experiential (33%) approaches, acknowledging that different skills require different learning methods. While this diversification offers significant benefits, it also creates new challenges for measuring effectiveness and business impact.
Measuring What Matters
As blended learning becomes more prevalent, it creates significant measurement challenges. During the webinar, attendees identified their biggest hurdles:
- Disconnected data from multiple learning components
- Survey fatigue affecting response rates
- Difficulty demonstrating business impact and ROI
- Limited resources to implement comprehensive measurement
Most learning leaders feel caught between competing priorities and stakeholder demands. Brandon Hall Group™ research indicates that the most successful L&D teams are those that have clearly defined their role as business partners rather than service providers. Effective measurement becomes the bridge between learning activities and ROI, providing data to justify long-term investments while showing immediate wins.
This is precisely where Explorance’s Metrics That Matter solution provides value. Michael Cohen, GM of the Metrics That Matter division at Explorance, explained how organizations can implement systematic measurement approaches that transform learning data into business insights.
Data-Driven Learning Evolution
During the webinar, Cohen demonstrated this approach through a compelling year-long leadership development program case study. The program combined multiple learning modalities across four quarters, with a measurement plan tailored to each approach:
- Email-based check-ins for program updates
- QR codes for in-session feedback during facilitated learning
- Embedded survey links within self-paced e-learning
“The measurement plan is flexible on what and how that measurement will be accomplished,” Cohen explained. “The level of feedback rigor is different based on the modality and the length of the training interventions.”
Using the Metrics That Matter platform, the initial assessment showed promising overall results: 80% effectiveness scores and 27% scrap learning. Many organizations would stop there, satisfied with seemingly strong numbers.
“If all you saw were these numbers, your reaction might be, this program is going great. Don’t break what isn’t broken,” Cohen pointed out. “But when you start drilling into the data further within the dashboard, you see that there are indeed opportunities for improvement.”
The system’s detailed analysis revealed that self-paced e-learning components were underperforming across multiple metrics:
- Higher scrap learning rates than other modalities
- Lower net promoter scores
- Decreasing performance improvement trends
Most valuable was the platform’s AI-driven text analysis capability called Explorance MLY, which identified patterns in participant feedback without requiring analysts to read every comment. The analysis showed learners consistently requesting “more practice exercises, tutorials, and workshops.”
Armed with this insight, the organization made a mid-program pivot, replacing self-paced learning with hands-on labs for the remaining quarters. This real-time adaptation demonstrates the true potential of measuring in the flow of learning.
The following results tie directly to impressive financial savings:
- 4% reduction in scrap learning
- 6% improvement in key performance metrics
- 5% increase in performance improvement
- 2% increase in net promoter scores
The Financial Impact of Measurement
Steve Lange, Director of Metrics That Matter at Explorance, demonstrated how these seemingly modest percentage improvements translate into significant financial impact. Using an estimated $1200 to $1550 average spend per employee (Brandon Hall Group™ research) that translates to:
- A 4% reduction in scrap learning for 300 participants saved $15,000 in wasted training investment
- A 5% increase in performance improvement translated to over $1.1 million in performance value
“Scrap learning is stuff that’s not used,” Lange explained. “We borrowed this concept from the manufacturing environment where scrap represents materials that go to waste. In corporate learning, we don’t want valuable training investments going unused any more than a manufacturer wants raw materials ending up in the trash.”
When scaled to 1,000 participants, these figures multiplied accordingly, highlighting how measurement-driven optimization creates both immediate and long-term value. This quantification transforms abstract learning metrics into concrete business outcomes that executives can easily understand and support.
Building Your Measurement Strategy
For L&D professionals seeking to master blended learning evaluations, the webinar offered several practical takeaways:
- Integrate measurement into design: Build your measurement plan as part of program development, not as an afterthought. “The measurement is part of the foundation,” emphasized Cohen. “Don’t build your program and then think about how am I going to measure? Build your measurement plan as you’re building out the program.”
- Vary your approach: Customize feedback methods based on learning modalities to reduce survey fatigue and increase response rates. Explorance’s platform supports multiple collection methods from QR codes to embedded links.
- Create feedback loops: Show participants their feedback drives meaningful changes. “A client in a manufacturing environment put up a bulletin that they regularly changed out on a monthly basis that said: This is what you said. This is what we did. And it showed the participants that they were being listened to,” Cohen said
- Tell data-driven stories: Learn to translate measurement data into compelling narratives for different stakeholders. “It’s not about putting a bunch of graphs and charts and pictures on 25 slides,” noted Lange. “It’s literally telling the story. You’ve got to answer a couple of questions: what, so what, and now what?”
- Engage managers: Develop manager support guides that help supervisors reinforce training applications and understand their role in the evaluation process. Lange explained, “When engaging the managers, the learners are even more engaged and then they’re going to be more conducive to completing these surveys.”
The most successful L&D teams speak the language of business impact, drawing clear connections between learning activities and organizational outcomes.
By implementing these practices, L&D leaders can not only protect their budgets in challenging times but potentially expand their influence — even when other departments face cuts. Data-driven decision-making earns L&D professionals that coveted “seat at the table” where strategic business decisions are made.
Want to dive deeper into measuring blended learning effectiveness? View the complete webinar on demand here.
