Standard Chartered ran the numbers on its own hiring and found that reskilling and redeploying an existing employee saved roughly $49,000 compared with hiring someone new for the same skills. Between 2023 and mid-2025, the bank raised internal hiring from about 30% of roles to more than half, cutting over $55 million in hiring costs and fees. Its chief strategy and talent officer, Tanuj Kapilashrami, told Fortune in March 2026 that the change began with a question: "If you start thinking of skills, rather than jobs, as the currency of work, what choices would you make in how work gets done?"
Gallup puts the cost of replacing an employee at one-half to two times their annual salary, so the case for building capability internally is easy to make. Making it with evidence is harder, because most learning programs don't generate the kind of proof a CFO recognizes.
Instructure's new survey report, "Learning Programs Have an Outcomes Problem," shows how wide that gap runs. Among 1,166 U.S. respondents across HR, learning and development, technology, finance and senior leadership, 57% said their organization prioritizes measurable outcomes to a great or very great extent. Only 53% said they can communicate program impact using data that well, and 21% reported little to no ability to do it.
HR carries that gap. Across the seven outcomes the survey measured, from on-the-job performance to internal mobility, HR leaders held higher expectations on average than any other function surveyed. HR asks the most of learning programs, and HR gets asked most often what those programs returned.
What HR is up against
The survey asked respondents about seven specific obstacles: budget constraints, staffing constraints, limited workforce data, manual enrollment, reporting limitations, difficulty expanding programs and siloed systems. Between 42% and 46% flagged each one as a significant limitation.
Melissa Loble, chief learning officer at Instructure, reads that even spread as a sign of missed connections across an organization. Learning, performance and business results tend to live in separate systems, owned by separate teams, reported on separate cycles. The effort is there, but not the connection.
What leaders can see when skills are tracked
Demand for capabilities like data literacy and AI fluency is already outrunning supply. McKinsey found that 87% of companies say they have skill gaps or expect them within a few years. But knowing there are gaps is different from knowing where they are, across which teams. A skills record tells HR which capabilities their workforce has, where the thin spots are and which roles people could realistically move into next.
"By focusing on skills, [organizations] can better understand the capabilities they already have, identify where gaps are emerging and connect learning investments more directly to business priorities and workforce needs," Loble says.
Organizations already recognize this link. LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found 88% of organizations concerned about employee retention, and respondents ranked learning opportunities as their top retention strategy. Naming learning the top retention strategy puts the burden back on HR to show it's working.
They can get there two ways. The first is mapping the skills a workforce already has against the ones the business will need, which turns a training budget request into a workforce plan. The second is deciding what counts as evidence before a program launches, whether that's participation, assessment results, demonstrated skills or the workforce measures leaders already watch. Survey respondents with the strongest evidence of impact were also the most likely to keep improving how they measured it, which suggests the habit compounds.
"Learning should help people see a future for themselves and give leaders a clearer sense of what is working," Loble says. "When the outcomes are clear, and the evidence is there, organizations can make better decisions about where to invest."
Learn more about how Canvas Career by Instructure helps organizations build skills and show outcomes.
