Finance is the function the rest of the company relies on to measure things. It is also, by its own account, struggling to measure the value of investing in people. In EY’s Global DNA of the CFO Survey, published in June 2026 and based on 1,610 CFOs, finance directors and heads of finance, 71% said traditional metrics are not enough to evaluate initiatives that bring together people and technology. Almost half, 47%, said their team lacks the ability to measure the value created by initiatives involving emerging technology, new roles and new ways of working. The respondents’ top challenge was that the return on such initiatives is often hard to define or prove up front.

Capability building sits squarely in that category. A program that teaches finance professionals to influence stakeholders or frame problems asks them to behave differently, and the payoff arrives indirectly, through better decisions made elsewhere in the business. That makes it easy to approve on instinct and hard to defend when budgets tighten.

Why The Usual Metrics Fall Short

The measures most organizations reach for are easy to collect and say little about whether work has changed. LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found that the most common ways organizations measure the business impact of career development are employee engagement (72%), retention (64%), employees developing new skills (55%), promotions (48%) and internal mobility (32%). Each is worth tracking. But all of them describe what happens inside the talent system rather than what happens in the business. LinkedIn’s own guidance acknowledges a disconnect between learning metrics and business metrics of success.

The gap shows up in broader data too. ATD’s 2026 State of the Industry report found that fewer than a quarter of organizations measure whether their training programs achieve organizational goals, and an even smaller........

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