Traditional learning analytics often focus on course completions rather than engagement, retention, or business outcomes. This session will show how organizations can evolve their approach by integrating xAPI, Power BI, and Power Automate to track learner interactions beyond pass/fail metrics—including behaviors such as video engagement, resource downloads, and post-training actions.

We will explore real-world case studies where learning analytics transformed business impact, shifting L&D from a cost center to a strategic partner. Through participation in hands-on exercises and discussions, you will leave with a blueprint for implementing data-driven learning strategies in your own organization. No prior experience with analytics tools is required, but a basic understanding of learning management systems (LMS) and corporate training structures will be helpful.

In this session, you’ll see how to bring data to life. We’ll address strategies to use PowerPoint to approach data visualization and data storytelling based on your audience, your objective, the use case, and within any requirements set. You’ll explore techniques to create suitable graphs, charts, and diagrams that convey the key ideas in an elegant and memorable way and help your audience to understand what’s important, why it matters, and what they should do as a result.

You’ll also learn about various approaches to presenting or reporting this kind of information with effective structures for one-pagers, interactive reports or PDFs, responsive presentations, or interactive decks.

Rather than pursuing perfect attribution, our approach focused on selecting a small set of meaningful metrics, establishing clear criteria for what to measure, and aligning learning to business priorities using existing, easy to gather data.

This session will share the design decisions, assumptions tested, lessons learned, and how the approach evolved once theory met reality. You will learn to evaluate learning impact options that fit your context and constraints and identify practical first steps for exploring learning impact. You will walk away able to use clear, shared language to discuss with stakeholders the learning impact and business alignment of your work.

In this hands-on session, I’ll introduce the L&D Metrics Hierarchy—a four-tiered framework developed to help Fortune 500 companies align learning metrics with business outcomes. As we explore each tier: Business Impact, Performance Outcomes, Learning Engagement, and Operational Efficiency, you will learn to use them to separate signal from noise. Together, we’ll learn to map your current metrics to strategic goals, uncover measurement gaps, and select the right visualizations to tell your story. You’ll leave with a practical framework, real-world examples, and clear steps to design dashboards that drive decisions.

A digital workbook and sample datasets will be provided for download via a QR code. The presenter recommends becoming familiar with the free version of Datawrapper or Flourish Studio, or open-source RAWGraphs, for chart creation.

We will look at ways to talk about your L&D projects while they are still taking shape and how you can share early wins and progress in ways the leaders will trust. You’ll also learn how to set clear expectations with leaders during periods of change and communicate momentum without overselling results. We’ll explore practical examples and real scenarios, enabling you to walk away with simple ways to explain your work, build credibility, and keep leaders informed while your learning programs continue to evolve.

This session reframes data as a language, moving from semantic reporting (what each survey question literally says) to pragmatic meaning (insights interpreted in context to drive behavior change). You’ll see how to use AI and pattern analysis to identify meaningful patterns in your mix of quantitative and qualitative data. These “”experience patterns”” can then be integrated into a strategic behavior-change approach, such as MOJO (Motivation, Opportunity, Job Capabilities, Outcome), to inform recommendations.

You will leave this session equipped to pull contextual meaning from data and provide it to leaders in an actionable way that connects learning results to capability, opportunity, and clear outcomes. You’ll also be able to communicate impact as a strategic narrative, aligning recommendations to behavior change and organizational goals.