David James dropped this truth bomb on LinkedIn on Monday:

“…rather than see this as a threat, we should embrace the possibilities of data and recognise its value to L&D and the organisations we support.”

I was speaking to someone recently about talent programmes. I don’t want to know how many people completed it, I want to know the average period for people to be promoted from the programme against those who weren’t successful at application and to those who didn’t apply.

I don’t want to know the number of people completing GDPR learning; I want to know the number of breaches, near misses, successful DSR requests and increase in compliance measures.

I don’t want to know about the number of managers completing mental health awareness training; I want to know how sickness absence has varied, the reasons, the periods of time off, the manager’s own mental health and impact on performance of the teams.

Data is the right numbers.