4 tips from a Product Design Leader on how L&D can prove real business impact
Most L&D dashboards look busy. Courses are completed. Mandatory training is tracked. Participation rates are visible. But when a senior stakeholder leans across the table and asks, “So what?” – those metrics often fall apart.
As Head of Product Design & Research at Kallidus, Amy Hill is focused on helping organisations move beyond learning metrics that look impressive but reveal little about business impact. Her work sits at the intersection of user research, product innovation, and organisational performance, giving her a unique perspective on a challenge many L&D leaders face: proving the value of learning. Kallidus refers to this challenge as The Activity Trap – the tendency to measure participation and completion rates while struggling to demonstrate meaningful improvements in performance, productivity, retention, or revenue.
It’s a trap most L&D teams know they’re in. Getting out is harder.
During KalliFest on 4th June 2026, and a live webinar on 16th June 2026, Amy put this to the room directly. She asked attendees whether they measure activity-style metrics. Nearly everyone does. She asked whether those metrics had ever failed to answer a stakeholder question. A majority said yes. Then she asked whether L&D leaders felt confident they could provide meaningful evidence of impact on the metrics the business cares about — risk, retention, productivity, revenue. Almost everyone said no.
“L&D know it’s happening,” Amy says. “But if they can’t show evidence of it, it’s tricky.”
Her answer, shaped by research and real L&D pain, isn’t “measure more things.” It’s to measure the right things – by creating a clear, defensible line between learning activity and business outcomes. Here are four ways Amy recommends doing it.
Tip 1: Start with the outcomes that matter, not historic learning activity
L&D teams cannot prove impact if they begin with completions. Amy is clear on this from her research: the starting point has to be the outcomes the business already cares about.
She frames these as four outcome pillars:
- Risk: Is learning reducing incidents, compliance failures, or regulatory exposure?
- Retention: Is development contributing to people staying?
- Productivity: Are skills gaps being closed in ways that improve performance?
- Revenue: Is capability growth contributing to commercial results?
The point isn’t that every learning programme must affect all four. The point is that L&D needs to connect its work to outcomes that leaders already discuss in boardrooms.
To make this concrete, Amy uses the example of a fictional healthcare organisation with two clear business goals: moving from a “good” Care Quality Commission rating to “outstanding,” and responding to employee demand for learning beyond mandatory training – leadership, management, and soft skills.
Instead of starting with “what courses should we launch?”, Amy starts with business context: care quality, inspection readiness, employee development, and capability. The course comes later. The outcome question comes first.
With Kallidus, L&D teams can define and track global objectives, such as reducing care quality incidents by 25%, that become the anchor everything else connects back to. Skills, development activities, manager conversations, and reporting all flow from that central goal.
“The shift from activity to impact starts before the course is built. It starts by asking: what business outcome are we trying to influence?”
Tip 2: Build a skills strategy around the behaviours that matter most
A common reason L&D teams stay stuck in activity reporting is that skills-based measurement feels too big to start. Amy hears this constantly – and as someone who designs for busy people trying to get things done, she has little patience for frameworks that collapse under their own weight. An organisation-wide skills taxonomy can seem like a years-long project before anything meaningful gets measured.
Amy’s advice is more practical: don’t start with everything. Start with the behaviours and capabilities most relevant to the outcome you’re trying to influence.
In her demo, the fictional healthcare organisation uses Kallidus to add targeted skills into its skills library, not every skill for every role, but the ones that connect directly to its goals. For a care quality objective, that means leadership, coaching, feedback handling, empathy, emotional intelligence, and conflict resolution. Skills that affect how people show up in patient interactions and in difficult conversations with colleagues.
“Small, intentional steps beat sprawling frameworks that never get implemented,” Amy says.
Kallidus intelligence supports this focused approach through its skills library and AI-assisted skills workflow. Teams can import an existing taxonomy or use AI to generate recommended skills based on organisational context, industry, goals, and desired behaviours. Critically, this is different from running a prompt through a general-purpose AI tool, because Kallidus intelligence factors in your actual people data, content, and learning activity – pushing toward your desired outcomes rather than producing generic suggestions.
Tip 3: Connect learning to objectives, development, and real performance conversations
The Activity Trap thrives when learning sits in isolation. A course completion, by itself, proves very little. It becomes meaningful when it connects to a role, a skill gap, a development activity, an objective, and a manager conversation.
Amy illustrates this through Florence, an employee whose patient satisfaction scores dip during difficult patient interactions. Her manager, Steve, creates a development activity called Handling Difficult Interactions with Patients, linked to Florence’s objective to improve patient satisfaction scores. Together, they identify the skills she needs: empathy, emotional intelligence, and conflict resolution. Then they link relevant courses from Kallidus Learn, emotional intelligence, difficult conversations, and empathy, to that development activity.
The difference in what gets reported is significant.
The weak version: “Florence completed three courses.”
The stronger version: “Florence completed targeted learning linked to specific skills, which supported a development activity, helped her make progress against a patient satisfaction objective, and contributed to measurable improvement in her scores.”
Same learning. Entirely different story.
Kallidus connects Learn and Perform so that learning links directly to skills profiles, development activities, objectives, and reviews. Managers can see evidence of completed activities and use it in review conversations. Business leaders can see how L&D goals align with business goals.
“The real value of learning appears when it becomes part of day-to-day performance -not when it sits as a completed line item in an LMS.”
Tip 4: Use reporting to tell the impact story stakeholders actually need
Good development work can be happening across an organisation and still fail to land with stakeholders – because the story is fragmented across spreadsheets, LMS reports, reviews, and manager notes. Reporting is what turns connected activity into credible evidence.
Amy shows three reports working together to demonstrate this.
Global objectives report. This shows whether global business objectives are linked to individual objectives. In the Strouden Health example, patient satisfaction is on track, and many individual objectives linked to it are complete. L&D can show alignment between individual performance and organisational goals, not just describe it.
Skills progress report. This gives a full picture of skills progress across the organisation. Instead of saying, “We uploaded 10 leadership courses and 80% of managers completed three,” L&D can say, “80% of managers are now at the required skill level for their role, supported by targeted learning and development activity.”
That is the escape from The Activity Trap.
Outcome-focused reporting across objectives and development. Amy then shows a report tying together global objectives, individual objectives, development activities, and skills data. In the example, patient satisfaction shows strong alignment between objectives, development activity, and business progress. Meanwhile, sickness and absence has objectives and development activities linked – but low progress. That gives leaders a clear, actionable signal: the development activities exist, but employees and managers need support to complete them.
Kallidus Reporting helps L&D teams move from “look how much learning happened” to “here is how learning contributed to capability, performance, and business progress.” It gives L&D leaders the evidence to have a different kind of stakeholder conversation -one about investment, prioritisation, and outcomes.
“L&D credibility depends on the ability to tell a joined-up evidence story. Reporting shouldn’t be an oversight or an admin task – it can do so much more when built well and embedded with data.”
The way out of The Activity Trap
The Activity Trap tightens when L&D is forced to rely on completion metrics that can’t answer business-critical questions. Amy Hill’s approach gives L&D teams a practical route out:
- Start with business outcomes, not historic learning activity
- Build a focused skills strategy, not a sprawling taxonomy
- Connect learning to development, objectives, and performance, not just LMS records
- Use reporting to prove the story, not just track the activity
The goal isn’t perfect measurement from day one. Amy’s message is more realistic and more useful: start with focused skills, a few meaningful objectives, and clear reporting that connects learning to the outcomes your leaders already care about. Build from there.
When you can show that 80% of managers are at the required skill level, not that 80% completed a course, you’re having a different conversation. A better one.
Ready to see how Kallidus helps L&D teams move from activity reporting to outcome reporting? Take the Kallidus product tour to explore our Reporting capabilities and see how you can connect learning, skills, objectives, and development activity to measurable business impact.
Claire Moloney
