u/PhysicallyVigorous1

I'm three years in and ready to push for a senior title, but I'm struggling to build the business case for it. In other functions — sales, engineering, marketing — impact has cleaner numbers. In L&D I can show completion rates and Kirkpatrick Level 1 scores, but everyone knows those don't prove much about actual performance change.

How have people in this field made a compelling case for promotion when the metrics are fuzzy? Did you tie your work to business outcomes retroactively, or build measurement in from the start? I want to walk into this conversation with something more than "the feedback was positive."

Before I build anything now I write a single page that covers: the performance gap we're addressing, who the learners are, what success looks like, and what the course will and won't cover. I send it for approval before touching any authoring tool. It sounds like extra work but it consistently surfaces disagreements about scope before I've invested 40 hours in a build.

The best part is it gives me something to point to when scope creep happens mid-project. "That's a great idea — it wasn't in the approved brief so let's discuss whether it changes our timeline." Stakeholders respect the process a lot more when they've already signed off on the plan. Anyone else using something similar?

I use Storyline every day and I'm not saying it's bad — it's genuinely powerful. But I've noticed that when a stakeholder asks for training, my brain immediately jumps to "click-next module" before I've even done a proper needs analysis. The tool has become the default solution rather than one option among many.

I've been pushing myself to ask "does this actually need to be an eLearning course?" more often this year. More than half the time the answer is no — a job aid, a short video, or a better process would do more. What tools or formats have you defaulted away from Storyline toward?

Doing 20–30 min daily worked better for me than random 3-hour bursts. Less burnout, more consistency