L&D's $400 Billion Problem: Training That Proves Nothing

The learning and development industry is a $400 billion market, yet most organizations still cannot prove their training programs move business results. That contradiction sits at the center of a SPARK TALENT keynote by Noah Rabinowitz, Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry, who argues the field is efficient at selling solutions and notoriously bad at defining the problems those solutions are meant to solve.

Rabinowitz described the profession in one line: we belong to an industry that is "rich in solutions, poor in definition." His session laid out five arguments that challenge how HR and L&D leaders justify budgets, select vendors and report results to the C-suite.

Why completion rates prove nothing

Completion rates, star ratings and glowing feedback surveys look strong on a slide deck. They do not prove an employee learned anything useful. Liking a course is not evidence a skill improved.

"Activity on a skill gap is never the same as progress," Rabinowitz said. "If I did training and nothing changes, but the people liked it and thought it was valuable, did I create any value for the organization? No, I destroyed value. I actually consumed resources and produced no tangible positive output."

For people-analytics teams, the standard is blunt: measure whether a specific skill gap narrowed, not how many attendees gave a session a thumbs-up.

What does a real L&D problem look like?

Every serious initiative must start with a clearly defined gap between current behavior, the numerator, and target performance, the denominator. Rabinowitz called vague goals such as "our leaders need better executive presence" or "employees should use AI responsibly" untrainable and unmeasurable.

"A problem is never the absence of a course, a platform, a capability model, a workshop, or a new technology," he said. "A problem is only the gap between the current state and the desired future state. What I think is most important for L&D professionals is becoming great at diagnosing gaps. That is the core of what we're supposed to be doing."

His test for specificity: describe the target behavior in terms you would see if you followed an employee around with a video camera.

When should HR skip the expensive platform?

Sophistication is not a standard, Rabinowitz argued. An expensive platform, a complex simulation or an AI feature is not automatically better at closing a gap than a cheap intervention. This reframes the vendor-selection question from capability checklists to gap closure per dollar.

"If a napkin closes the gap faster, give me the napkin. The test is the gap, not the tooling," he said. "If a five-minute sketch gets someone to proficiency faster and cheaper than a platform, a library, a taxonomy, a framework, a model, a tool or a simulation, then the sketch on the napkin is the best solution, and the platform is just a more expensive way to be slower."

Why training cannot fix a broken process

Not every business problem is a learning problem. Rabinowitz cited performance consulting pioneer Gerry Rummler: "Put a good person up against a bad process, and the bad process will win every time."

"Not every business problem is a capability problem," Rabinowitz explained. "Almost all of the time, there's also a conditions gap. If there's a conditions gap at work, we can do as much as we possibly can, and the numerator and denominator delta never move."

Before commissioning training, HR should audit the environment: broken tools, poor systems, confusing approval layers and conflicting incentives. No course fixes a process flaw.

How should L&D calculate true ROI?

Licensing fees and vendor bills are only a fraction of program cost. The largest investment is employee payroll time spent away from core work, and Rabinowitz said most ROI models fail to count it rigorously.

"Once I calculate the hard costs and the value of the time, now I can actually tell business leaders: 'Closing ten points of our new capability gap is going to cost $17 million in employee payroll time plus $3 million in hard costs. Should we do it?'" he said. "That's the way every other business decision gets made in a company."

His framing gives L&D leaders a path to executive credibility: present financial trade-offs grounded in hard costs and employee hours, the same currency every other function uses.

The broader implication for HR teams heading into 2026 budget cycles is direct. Shift spend from tool acquisition toward precise gap diagnosis, or keep proving activity while the business asks what changed.