Thinking about how you’ll prove your training worked? Before a client asks “how will we know this landed?”, it helps to have an answer ready. In this post, Adam Portsmouth of Pathway Talent Development shares his L&D Credibility Toolkit, built for people working from the outside with no business data to lean on.
As a freelance or self-employed L&D professional, you rarely control what happens after you hand the work over — and you almost never get the business data that would prove it landed. Here’s a way to show real impact, built for people working from the outside.
Picture this. A company has approached you to build a suite of learning products — digital or in-person — on the understanding that they just need the deliverables. They’ll sort out delivery and ongoing support themselves.
A few weeks go by. You’re busy building, and your contact asks your opinion on how these learning products can be measured to make sure they’ve worked.
Do you have something ready to suggest?
- Something simple and flexible enough to work in most situations?
- Something that doesn’t need pre-planning or prior business data?
- Something that doesn’t rely on a level of trust or authority you haven’t had time to build?
- Something your contact can approve without going back to their superiors for buy-in?
If you paused on any of those, then read on.
The limbo freelancers work in
Freelancers and the self-employed in Learning & Development can find themselves in a strange limbo at the companies they work for.
We know, as professionals, that the work we deliver needs to be measured and tracked. “What gets measured gets improved.” But depending on the capacity you’re brought in under, you may have very little say over what happens once a deliverable is handed over. You might not be in a position to advise on next steps at all.
And depending on the maturity of the company’s L&D function, they may not even be aware that the learning needs measuring and iterating on. It’s a common story:
We have a problem. We think people need training to fix it. Build a course or workshop, add a quiz or assessment at the end, assume the problem goes away, mark the project complete, move on.
We act outside the company, with limited influence over what can and can’t be done. With experience you earn more of a say — some freelancers work end-to-end rather than simply building courses — but the question is the same whatever your capacity: are you advising on next steps? Are you ready to suggest how the work will be measured?
Why the usual measurement advice doesn’t fit us
Here’s the catch. Most L&D professionals — let alone freelancers working outside the business — don’t have easy access to business data. That’s the holy grail of measuring a learning implementation, and it’s usually out of reach.
I was becoming disillusioned with the talk of L&D needing “a seat at the table,” with little to no advice on how you actually get there. That was happening at exactly the time I was trying to show clear, provable value on my own CV and portfolio.
What is far easier to propose and put in place alongside your work is a strategic use of anecdotal feedback at scale. Not business data. Not ROI in pounds and pence. But structured, credible evidence that behaviour is changing — which is what most people actually mean when they ask whether the training worked.
A framework built for working from the outside
This is what I’ve spent the last few years of my career building: the L&D Credibility Toolkit.
It’s an easy-to-implement, incremental framework that works through three successive levels of feedback:
- Level 1 — Learner opinions. Structured feedback from the people going through the learning, gathered as an ongoing dialogue rather than a one-off score.
- Level 2 — Manager observations. Evidence from managers on whether behaviour is actually changing on the ground.
- Level 3 — Validated commitments. Confirmed commitments from both the learner and their manager, giving you organisational credibility rather than opinion alone.
Each level can be suggested and implemented on its own or as a group, and each one adds a further layer of value.
Now go back to that checklist from the top. It’s simple and flexible enough for most situations. It doesn’t need prior business data. It doesn’t rely on authority you haven’t had time to earn. And your contact can usually approve it without further buy-in from above.
His approach creates buy-in because leaders can immediately understand how learning connects to business outcomes.
Brittany Cowan – Cowan Learning Solutions
To be clear about what it won’t do: it won’t show you monetary ROI. That would take prior conversations and far more data than you’re likely to have as a freelancer. What it will do is give you something credible to put your name to — and something ready to suggest the moment a client asks, “how will we know this worked?”
What it looked like in practice
One contract involved building an entire training programme from scratch — a large investment for a company with no formal L&D infrastructure.
At the outset, the CEO wanted a quiz at the end of each course to prove the learning was effective. An approach which is commonly used as a way to track completion. The CEO did not realise there are far better ways to prove effectiveness’ than a 10 question assessment.
By that point I’d developed and tested a good deal of the toolkit, so it was an easy alternative to suggest. After all, we want to see whether behaviours are changing, not whether people got the quiz answers right.
It turned out to be the right call. We had an overwhelming 86% response rate across the programme — a significant success on its own. And because Level 1 opens up a genuine dialogue, we were able to catch issues, spot poor design choices, and add specific relevancies in real time, as we built each product.
After only a couple of weeks we saw a substantial increase in the number of feedback froms completed by learners – which provided better data to work with
Beth – Learning Design and Delivery Facilitator
From “good quality work” to “the results speak for themselves”
The toolkit has been implemented by both in-house teams and freelance consultants, across companies of different sizes, cultures and countries. It’s changed the testimonials people give — from “the work was good quality” to “the results speak for themselves.”
For a freelancer, that shift is everything. Good-quality work gets you paid. Provable results get you rehired, recommended and remembered.
So whatever capacity you find yourself working in, the question stands: when your client asks how you’ll know the learning worked, will you have an answer ready?
