2025 is already underway, and I’m sure you’ve shared your vision, strategy, and plans with your Chief HR Officer, business leaders, CEO, and team.

So, what's next?

Now it’s time to track your strategy's progress and validate whether it's actually leading to the results you envisioned.

While many of us in L&D focus on demonstrating the impact of our initiatives, learning analytics is equally valuable for monitoring the execution of your strategy. It helps ensure that your strategy works. In this special edition of Learning Analytics Made Easy, I’ll walk you through how data and analytics can uplift your L&D strategy and make it truly effective!

Your L&D Strategy is about making Choices

What to stop….that is the question!

A strategy is about making choices to create unique value. Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy and A.G. Lafley’s Playing to Win emphasize that a solid strategy is an “integrated set of choices” that creates sustainable advantages. Too often, we see L&D strategies that fall short of this standard. Here are a few examples:

1. Vision or Mission Statements
   L&D strategies often start with great visions like “empowering employees with the right skills.” While inspiring, these are too vague to drive actionable choices.

2. Plans Without Strategy
   Statements like “we’ll deliver 8 new AI programs in 2025” are plans, not strategies. A strategy requires specific choices.

3. Optimizing the Status Quo
   For example, using AI to optimize content creation sounds like a great idea, but it's not a strategy that differentiates you.

4. Following Best Practices
   Benchmarking against industry standards can be useful, but I've never seen a team win solely by relying on benchmarks.

In L&D, we often try to do too much. Porter’s strategic approaches—cost leadership, differentiation, and focus—can guide us in making the right decisions on where to concentrate our efforts.

Data is key in making those decisions. Data helps you understand your organization’s needs, strengths, and weaknesses. With predictive and prescriptive analytics, data can even help you foresee the impact of your choices.

Without data, you’re traveling without a map. You don't know where you are, where you're headed, or if your route is the right one.

Where to Play? Focus, focus, focus…

Years ago, I was consulting at a major global company when I discovered that a specific team was driving a significant portion of the company's revenue. I had been focused on compliance learning analytics at the time, and this team was very interested in my dashboard as meeting compliance learning targets was a major topic. When I got to know this team better, I learned that they were contributing far more to the company’s revenue than I realized. I wondered….if the contribute so much, why don’t they get special attention from L&D? My takeaway? L&D often overlooks areas that make the biggest impact on business performance.

Data helps us identify where to focus our efforts—on the teams, products, and locations that matter most. Do your L&D investments align with these critical areas of your business? Are they reflected in the participation and success of your top programs?

A real life example:
When we debated whether to invest in translations for a small group of employees, the discussion was very much based on opinions. Some people in the room were for investing in translations, some were against. Each for good personal reasons. But each from a personal perspective. I looked at the data. The group wasn’t strategically important, and they were already engaging heavily with English-language content. The data made the decision clear: there was actually no need for translations.

How to win? Drive Efficiency and Effectiveness…

Efficiency vs. effectiveness: This is a discussion I always enjoy. To simplify it: efficiency is doing things right, while effectiveness is doing the right things.

Being both extremely efficient and very effective is almost impossible. For sure it’s very hard to achieve in the little time we often get to address the challenges in our organization. But where do we compromise? Efficiency or effectiveness? A good ‘how to win’ strategy must balance between efficiency and effectiveness. And data and analytics are essential to strike the right balance.

Would you invest in a cheap external learning library if in-house content creation would be much more expensive? This is very efficient. But what if you cannot demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of these libraries? Would it still be worth it?

Would you pay for an expensive leadership program? It’s not really efficient. But what if you can prove it has a major impact on the business and is highly effective? Would that make it worth to invest?

Would you save money on compliance learning to drive efficiency? This sounds like a really good idea, especially if you are operating in a heavily legislated environment like manufacturing where a large portion of L&D is about compliance and the potential savings are huge! But what if that makes your effectiveness drop to a point where it starts to negatively impact the risk for incidents?

My final example is also one close to my heart….the implementation of learning platforms. Learning platforms are often selected and implemented with the efficiency of the administrators and coordinators in mind; they are the stakeholders at the table when decisions are made. But what about the employees? What about the end user experience? Our drive to make administration and maintenance as efficient as we can often hurts our ability to create effective learning experiences. In short, it hurts the effectiveness of our learning platforms!

How these examples link with data and analytics? Well….Data and analytics are essential in balancing efficiency and effectiveness. Without measuring both, you risk overspending or underdelivering.

The perfect balance between effectiveness and efficiency is heavily influenced by your area’s of focus. Or as Lafley mentions in his book ‘how to win’: “The where-to-play and how-to-win choices should flow from and reinforce one another.” So you could make a conscious decision to focus on effectiveness and compromise on efficiency in area’s where you serve the learning needs of your top performing employees. Likewise you could decide to focus more on efficiency and compromising on effectiveness in area’s that have less direct impact on the bottom line.

But whatever you choice is….you will need data in order to make the choice and prove that your strategy is delivering on it’s promise!

Capabilities and Systems: Data, Processes & Technology.

Porter and Lafley emphasize that strategy is a process. It’s not something you just write down and forget about. A strategy is a hypothesis that needs continuous monitoring and adjustment.

The key capability you need to execute your strategy? Data.

As Lafley points out, strategy requires the right systems and capabilities. Too often, we think of data as an afterthought, but it should come first.

To put it simply:

1. Set your goals and objectives.

2. Define a strategy to achieve them.

3. Identify the metrics that track progress and success.

4. Determine the data needed to calculate these metrics.

5. Only then, figure out the tools and processes to gather that data.

Putting data before people, processes and tools is what makes this approach different from others. Many of us consider data to be only an afterthought, if relevant at all! And I believe that’s where we can improve massively. It for sure makes our lives much easier. A few examples.

A vision of “fast and learning for all” with a strategy focusing on efficiency by contracting external learning content libraries can be tracked through the metric ‘cost per learning hour delivered’. In order to track this metric, you need specific data on the estimated time required to complete a learning activity and how many employees have completed activities. So before you sign the contract with your external libraries, you must ensure that they can actually provide this data. Else you will not be able to track the success of your strategy!

Another example is a vision to “provide the best possible employee experience” supported by implementing a brand new advanced learning tool with an AI driven recommendation engine (your strategy) and measured by NPS as the metric for success. When you don’t also implement clear data standards, guidelines and processes to ensure meaningful titles and learning activity descriptions, chances are you end up with an amazing tool that recommends learning titles that do not mean anything to employees because they are to cryptic, or contain too much jargon. And that the AI has difficulties recommending the right learning because it simply is not able to understand what the training is about because the descriptions are of poor quality.

3 L&D Strategies that will Amaze

Here are 3 examples of amazing L&D strategies that have focus, a game plan and concrete measures:

That is all fun and games…but what about AI

I hope I have been able to explain how Data and Analytics are an essential part of your strategy. Your strategy forces you to make choices, for which you require data, and is a continuous process where you need data to track not just how well your strategy is executed, but also if it indeed leads to the success you were aiming for.

But then comes AI and everything changes. But what does AI mean for your L&D strategy?

• AI challenges L&D to rethink its role: What’s left for L&D when employees can ask AI chatbots for all the answers? And when AI can act as a personalized learning coach? There are huge opportunities for L&D to transform into high-quality, personalized "boutique learning shops." by adopting the idea of focus on take it to an almost extreme level where you only work the very strategic learning needs and audiences of your company.

• AI demands better data: AI is powered by data. Without high-quality data, AI won’t work. So my strategy tip for L&D in 2025 is to make data a very explicit part of your strategy to ensure you have lots of it, and high quality…

• AI can shape your strategy: AI can also help you to formulate your strategy! It can analyze the market, understand your competition, and even translate your strategies into measurable actions. But remember, AI needs careful guidance—don’t blindly trust its outputs.

Upcoming Events and Resources

Learning Analytics Crash Courses
Join us soon for practical, hands-on learning analytics (and AI!) skills in a 6-week virtual series. Stay tuned for more details.

February = Learning Catalogue Health Month
This month, we’re focusing the newsletter on the health of your L&D catalogue. Just like your personal health, it’s time to assess and improve your L&D catalog health!

The Learning Analytics Toolkit
We’re working on a toolkit packed with videos, articles, case studies, and exercises to help you enhance your learning analytics skills. Stay tuned for more!

Let’s make data work for you.

Best,

Peter Meerman