Stop Buying Courses. Start Buying Behaviour Change.

A course is an input you can put on a purchase order. Behaviour change is the outcome you actually wanted. Procurement keeps buying the first and hoping for the second.

The gap between the two is where most training budgets quietly disappear. You approve a catalogue of courses, people complete them, and six months later the capability you were trying to build is nowhere in the numbers.

You did not want a course. You wanted a manager who can hold a hard conversation, a rep who can run a real discovery, a team that writes an email a client understands the first time.

Why the catalogue model fails

A course is easy to buy because it is easy to specify: a title, a duration, a headcount, a price. So that is what procurement optimises. But none of those inputs tell you whether anyone did the job differently afterwards.

LinkedIn's Workplace Learning research has flagged the same thing year after year: proving the business impact of learning remains one of L&D's hardest and most persistent challenges. When you cannot measure the outcome, you default to measuring the input, and the input quietly becomes the goal.

Buy the outcome instead

The fix is not a better course. It is a better contract. Before you talk to a single vendor, write down the behaviour you want to change and the number that would move if it worked.

• Name the target behaviour, in observable terms a manager could see.

• Pick one business metric you already report that the behaviour should move.

• Agree how you will baseline it before, and re-measure it after.

• Make the vendor commit to that measurement, not just delivery.

• Ask for the evidence: a past client where the number actually moved.

That last set of questions is the whole game. A vendor who can only sell you a course will get uncomfortable. A vendor who builds behaviour change will have the answers ready, because that is how they work anyway.

The skeptic's objection

Vendors cannot commit to outcomes.

They can, if the measurement is designed honestly. Yzerly's model is built on it: baseline the behaviour and the business metric first, design to that specific gap, then re-measure on the same numbers. Stop buying courses and hoping. Start buying the change, and make everyone you evaluate, us included, prove they can deliver it.

Sources

• LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report: proving the business impact of learning remains a top, persistent L&D challenge (learning.linkedin.com).

Written by Mahesh Tharani. Connect on LinkedIn.