Five years ago I was on holiday in the Highlands of Scotland when I received the phone call from my head of department. I was being put at risk of redundancy.
It was two weeks before Christmas.
It was two months before my wedding.
Not a great time to get that call.
I'd been in Learning & Development for five years at that point. And in the days that followed, when I sat down to make the case for my own value, I found I could only point to one thing: courses produced.
Don't get me wrong — the courses were high-quality, well produced, and as far as I was told, well received. But that was all I had. Outputs. No evidence of what those outputs had actually changed.
The problem with this model — and something I now agree with fully — is that the number of outputs means nothing if you have no understanding of what the impact or results of those outputs were.
Like a sales team that shows its value by the number of sales calls made, rather than the number of sales landed.
I knew what impact looked like. I just couldn't prove mine.
What made this harder to accept was that I'd already seen what L&D impact looks like when it's real.
I started my career in a small but relatively successful eLearning development agency, learning the tools of the trade and building engaging, effective eLearning products for companies across three continents and a wide range of industries. My exposure to the industry was simple: build engaging courses from provided or pre-existing content. No exposure, considerations, or concerns about what happens before or after the course build stage.
My next position was as an IT Trainer and Developer for the Civil Service Fire Department — their first ever remote hire, joining during Covid lockdown. Here I got my first exposure to the 'before' stages of learning development: being part of early discussions for new software and hardware, and shaping how best to structure and deliver the training that would follow.
It was here I had the most rewarding experience of my career. One of the new tools I developed training for was used successfully to help save lives on a fire call.
Playing even a small part in that event showed me the value that Learning & Development can provide when it's connected to something that matters.
Then I moved on, back into a role that was firmly course development — with little input into the analysis that came before, and no view of what happened after. Eight months later, the redundancy-risk call came.
I had seen what L&D could do. I just couldn't prove that mine did anything.
From a job I landed in, to a career I committed to
The redundancy risk resulted in me looking for my next role. But it did something more important than that. It was the point where Learning & Development went from just a job that I'd landed in, to a full commitment career.
In my next role, I was obsessed with one question: how do I find, measure, and showcase the impact of my work?
The starting point was noticing something that, in hindsight, is remarkable. The team had no formal system to find out what happened after courses were assigned to learners on the LMS — nothing beyond the most basic feedback form housed on the LMS page.
And here's the thing: this wasn't unusual. Every L&D team I'd been part of in my career operated the same way. Speaking with others across the industry confirmed it. Courses go out. Completions get reported. And then — nothing. No system for capturing what changed, no evidence trail, no way to answer the question every L&D professional will eventually be asked:
"What difference did any of this actually make?"
If you're in L&D right now and someone asked you that question tomorrow, could you answer it? With evidence, not anecdotes?
That was the question I couldn't answer in the Highlands. So I built a system that could.
What I built
I started with the foundations: a system for anyone starting at zero. This became Level 1 of what is now The L&D Credibility Toolkit — a framework for showing impact on learners and tracing the behaviour changes caused by learning and development products.
Implementing Level 1 led to:
- Over 10,000 pieces of learner feedback reviewed and acted on
- Recognition at senior leadership level
- An internal award for the work
(I've covered that implementation in detail in a separate article if you want to see how it worked in practice.)
But a framework that works once, in one company, is an anecdote. So the real test came later.
Today I work as an independent consultant in people development — in a position where I can turn down work that isn't right, which is a sentence I could not have imagined writing on that phone call in the Highlands. That position gave me the space to develop Levels 2 and 3 of the framework, and to have them tested and verified in two other companies of vastly different culture, size, and country.
Same framework. Different organisations. The evidence held.
The question is when you'll need it, not if
Here's what I've come to understand about that phone call: it wasn't unfair. Uncomfortable, badly timed, yes. But from the business's perspective, they were looking at a function that couldn't draw a line between its work and a business outcome. When budgets tighten, that's the function at risk.
Redundancy risk doesn't announce itself. Nobody warns you that in eight months, someone will ask what your work has actually achieved. The only defence is to be able to answer that question before anyone asks it.
That's what The L&D Credibility Toolkit is. It's the system I wish had existed when I got that call — everything I learned the hard way, structured into a framework you can implement from zero. No specialist skills required. It walks you through building the evidence trail for your work: the impact on learners, the behaviour change it caused, and the credibility that follows — for your CV, your connections, and your influence in your organisation.
I built it because of a phone call in the Highlands, two weeks before Christmas.
I'd rather you built it before yours.