Measuring Business Impact: A Workforce Development Practitioner's Guide
Measuring Business Impact is a guide on sector-based workforce development programs, focusing on how to engage with businesses and measure the benefits of workforce development interventions. The guide is meant to address any knowledge gap workforce development practitioners may have in terms of engaging with businesses and measuring their programs' business impact. The guide argues that measuring business impact must move beyond telling good stories about the benefits of training to more systematic examination of the changes in worker performance that result from training and how these changes are valued by the businesses involved. In turn, this will build the capacity of workforce development practitioners, businesses, and educational institutions to more systematically align training design and business goals.
Measuring Business Impact defines sector-based workforce development as targeting particular industry sectors to develop an understanding of their dynamics and needs in order to craft solutions tailored to that industry. Measuring Business Impact is organized around five key steps to measure the impact of a business intervention. These are:
- Define the problem and the training solution;
- Identify business impact indicators;
- Gather the data;
- Analyze the data; and
- Share and use the results of your analysis.
Each section of the guide includes a description of each step, suggestions and tools to support the process at each step, and relevant examples from Massachusetts to demonstrate business impact measurement in practice.
Measuring Business Impact: A Workforce Development Practitioner's Guide

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