Why most L&D budgets are spent on the wrong things
The CIPD's annual survey has reported, with impressive consistency, that UK organisations struggle to demonstrate the business impact of their L&D investment. This is not primarily a data problem or a measurement problem. It is a purchasing problem. The wrong things are being bought, and the wrong things are being bought for structural reasons that a better spreadsheet will not fix.
Three structural reasons account for the majority of underperforming L&D spend.
Structural reason 1: The person who buys the training is not the person who needs it to work
In most UK organisations, L&D purchasing decisions are made by HR or L&D teams in response to requests from line managers, who themselves respond to performance problems, engagement scores, or strategy documents. The person whose behaviour needs to change — the participant — is rarely involved in the purchasing decision, and the person who will be held accountable for whether the investment worked is rarely the person who made it.
This principal-agent structure systematically produces purchasing decisions optimised for the wrong outcomes. The L&D manager needs to be seen to respond to development needs. The line manager needs to be seen to develop their people. The participant needs to be seen to attend. None of these needs is the same as "this person needs to be able to do X differently in three months and here is a programme that reliably produces that outcome."
The consequence is that programme selection is dominated by factors relevant to the purchasing decision — availability, familiarity with the provider, reasonable price, delegate satisfaction scores — rather than factors relevant to the learning outcome.
Structural reason 2: The evaluation criteria are designed to confirm the decision, not assess it
Learning evaluation in most UK organisations is structurally backwards. Most organisations measure satisfaction immediately after the programme — the Kirkpatrick Level 1 "happy sheet" — and report these scores as evidence that the training was good. Kirkpatrick himself, before he died, spent considerable energy arguing against this interpretation of his framework. Level 1 measures whether participants enjoyed the experience, which is weakly correlated with whether they learned anything and barely correlated with whether they changed their behaviour.
The consequence is a systematic selection bias in favour of engaging, enjoyable programmes and against challenging, rigorous ones. A two-day facilitated leadership experience with outdoor activities and a charismatic facilitator will consistently outscore a rigorous case-based programme that challenges participants' thinking and produces genuine discomfort. On satisfaction data alone, the former looks like the better investment. On outcome data — which almost nobody collects rigorously — the picture is less clear.
Structural reason 3: Budget cycles create the wrong purchasing cadence
Annual budget cycles create a perverse incentive to spend on the same types of things at the same time each year, regardless of whether the underlying development needs have changed. The result is a rolling programme of familiar providers, well-known credentials, and established formats that has been optimised over years for ease of purchasing rather than quality of outcome.
The three questions that would change most budget decisions are, in sequence: what specifically needs to change as a result of this investment, and in what timeframe? How will we know whether that change has occurred? And given the answer to those two questions, is this the most effective way to produce that change at this cost? Most L&D budget decisions never reach the third question because the first two are not answered with sufficient specificity.
The structural problems are not solved by individual L&D managers asking better questions, though that helps at the margin. They are solved by organisations that treat learning investment with the same discipline they apply to other significant expenditure — which means defining the outcome before selecting the solution, and measuring the outcome after the investment has been made. This is not difficult. It is simply not the default.
The L&D Budget Justification Framework is built around these three questions, structured for a board-level presentation.