The ROI Mirage: Why Most Companies Can’t Actually Measure Training Impact

By Thomas Bohné

The Billion-Dollar Blind Spot

In 2023, U.S. companies spent over $101 billion on corporate learning and development (L&D). You’d think with that level of investment, leaders would know exactly what’s working. Yet in my research with 23 L&D leaders across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, a consistent theme emerged: we don’t know — and the tools we’re told to use to find out often can’t deliver.

One German L&D director summed it up bluntly:

“We have 100% completion on mandatory training — and no one can tell you if it changed a single thing.”

This isn’t negligence. It’s the result of decades of well-intentioned but unrealistic evaluation advice — much of it repeated in executive playbooks and even in these pages.

The Problem With ROI-First Thinking

For years, HBR and the broader management literature have urged companies to measure training impact like a CFO: calculate Return on Investment (ROI), use Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels, or at least track Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge value.

In theory, this is tidy. In practice, here’s what my interviews revealed:

• Legal barriers: In Europe, GDPR and works council rules forbid many forms of individual-level tracking, follow-up surveys, or even free-text feedback fields.
• Data fragmentation: Global companies juggle multiple Learning Management Systems (LMS) — often inherited from mergers — making consistent measurement impossible.
• Methodological fragility: NPS and completion rates are cheap to collect but misleading. High scores often reflect entertainment value, not skill transfer; 100% completion doesn’t guarantee application.
• Resource ceilings: Many L&D teams run with skeleton staff. One leader told me, “We could hire 20 people just to do evaluation — but we don’t have that luxury.”

In other words: ROI in training is not like ROI in capital projects. The measurement environment is constrained by law, technology, and the messy realities of human behavior.

The Mirage Effect

The danger isn’t just wasted effort on flawed metrics — it’s the false confidence they create. Leaders see a healthy NPS, a completion rate in the high 90s, or a tidy ROI slide and assume the program is delivering impact. This “mirage effect” hides the real performance gaps and prevents targeted improvement.