Unlike sales or marketing, for example, it’s harder to tie learning and development directly to a profit-and-loss statement. But it isn’t impossible — it just requires showing company leaders the right metrics.

What are the learning and development metrics your organization’s president or CEO is going to care about? The metrics that will get their attention and ensure you get the funding and voice needed to build a great learning program?

Here are six to get you started:

1. Learning completion rates

Candidly, this is probably the least compelling on the list. It’s also the easiest one to track, which is probably why it is the most commonly tracked.

That said, your CEO will likely be interested in how many people are participating in your learning and development program, which the company is spending money to fund. You want a lot of your people to take the courses you offer them.

Employees taking courses is an action within your learning program, but not the end result. The remaining five learning and development metrics are all about the result of employees taking those courses.

2. How quickly your new hires get up to speed

Okay, now we are getting to L&D metrics that have real impact on the bottom line. The faster you can get new hires up-to-speed, the better for the business. And learning and development plays an essential role in onboarding new hires.

This is easier to track for some positions than it is for others. For example, customer service might be easy to track, as once a person can handle customers on their own, they are fully onboarded. Conversely, for a more nebulous position like product marketer, it might be harder to track when the person is fully up-to-speed. Your best bet is to work with managers to figure out a reliable metric here.

Either way, if you can start tying your development program to new hires becoming productive sooner, you are going to get the attention of your CEO.

3. Employee retention

One of the key reasons organizations invest in learning and development programs is they want to keep their employees motivated and engaged. According to fresh insights from LinkedIn’s Skills Advantage Report, almost 25% of employees are not confident their skills are put to good use in their current roles. And employees who feel their skills are underutilized are 10x more likely to be job hunting compared to those who do feel their skills are being put to good use.

Bottom line? Measure the retention rate within your company, comparing people you participate in learning programs to those who don’t. If the results show employees who participate in your learning programs are far more likely to stay with your organization, you have a compelling story to tell your CEO.

4. Internal mobility

Along the lines of the last point, one of the chief outcomes of your learning and development program should be upskilling and reskilling your workforce, so employees can fill new roles in a way that complements both business needs and their own growth.

To tie this directly to your learning program, it’s worth keeping tabs on the people who are moving around internally, whether they’re getting promoted or tackling new projects and tasks on different teams. Hopefully, a disproportionate percentage of this population is composed of people who have participated in your learning programs. (If not, you may need to revisit your offerings.)

This data is going to have real meaning to your CEO. Additional bonus — it also is a compelling argument for more employees to participate in your learning program, as it means it’ll increase their chances of getting promoted or taking on exciting new opportunities.

5. Time and budget-saving

With the rise of new learning tools and tech comes greater efficiency in curating, distributing, and measuring progress on learning programs. For example, Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs) offer AI-driven personalized learning features that serve your learners the right information at the right time. This eliminates a lot of wasted time and effort spent on training users on skills they already have attained or don’t need. It also ensures that your people are learning personally relevant and business-critical skills.

And for L&D, more time on your plate is incredibly valuable. According to LinkedIn data, 66% of L&D pros agree that their function has become a much more strategic part of their organizations. With time saved from culling through jam-packed course libraries, L&D can direct their energy towards collaborating with their HR colleagues and leadership on how they can adapt the workforce to meet present and future needs.

6. Progress toward closing skills gaps

Knowing your organization’s skills profile and future business needs can help you identify and close skills gaps that are critical for your business. Use these insights to recommend learning content and a strategic roadmap designed to further develop those skills.

Whether prompted by a change in external or internal environments, our workplaces are constantly evolving. A well-oiled learning strategy ensures that your organization and its people can keep up and stay competitive. It’s important for L&D pros to connect learning pathways to tangible skills. That way you can track and measure progress towards closing skills gaps.

Measuring progress on closing skills gaps is a useful way to showcase the impact of your learning plan. Not only does it enable you to intentionally curate the right content for your learners, but it also gives you the information you need to grow and iterate on your future plans.

The takeaway for L&D leadership

The best way to get the attention of your company’s leaders is to provide metrics that show how your learning program helps the business stay agile and adaptable in an ever-changing world while paying close attention to the bottom line.

If you can do that, you’ll start getting a bigger budget for your program and more of a voice within your company. And those two things are essential to building a truly transformative learning program.