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Research Report 2026 Edition A Survey of Industry Practice

Evaluation of
Learning &
Development

Industry practices & recommendations — what organizations measure, what they miss, and how to tie evaluation back to the outcomes that justify the investment.

Director of Research Dr. Charles Dye, Ph.D., J.D. CDR, USN (Ret.) · InSync Training, LLC Industry Researcher Trinity Callis InSync Training, LLC

 

Researchbook2v3
The short version

Most evaluation answers the wrong question.

A discussion about ROI is really a discussion about cost and consequence. Yet most practitioners measure what is easy to collect, not what the business asked for.

83%
of evaluation practitioners feel constrained by their data model — and that it gives an inaccurate or incomplete picture
73%
cannot articulate how their findings actually influence management decisions
13%
report evaluation data sources that are genuinely related to business outcomes
 

“We are throwing expensive darts with a blindfold on with no way to tell whether we hit the board or not.”

Dr. Charles Dye — Director of Research, InSync Training
200 practitioners surveyed 24 practitioner interviews 17 industries Exploratory sequential mixed-methods study
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Free, instant access to all 37 pages — the findings, the proposed evaluation approach, the logic model, and the complete data appendix.

37 pages · full methodology and data appendix
Notional logic model you can adapt to your own program
Every figure traceable to the underlying survey data


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