What can our real value be - to the companies we work for, to our clients, and to the learning profession?

I believe that our real value lies in our relevance. We are relevant when we serve as a means to achieving a particular purpose. In most companies, that's spelled out pretty clearly so you'd think that the path to being relevant as a learning professional would be easy. But often it's not because we confuse relevance with having value that can be quantified.

Something that is relevant - that helps your company achieve its purpose--will be valued. But think about this for a minute: it might not have a quantifiable value. It might not fit into a return-on-investment calculation or have a numerical value on a scorecard.

Even though it might not be a good idea to say this out loud in some places - all organizations do certain things for which ROI is not important - things like developing leaders or managing their talent so that it matches the goals that matter to the business. If those efforts support the purpose of the organization, they will be valued.

Your CEO will not ask you to quantify them. I promise. All CEOs would tell you that developing the next generation of leaders is important. The purpose is the point.

There are other things - such as social networking - where organizations are only beginning to really understand the value - but have seen its relevance for quite some time.

I am certain that many of you will soon find yourselves involved in making that connection. You will be the ones figuring out how to align the use of social tools such as Facebook or Twitter to a purpose that matters in your organization. This will be a great opportunity for many of you to increase your relevance.

As we know from our experiences across the years, a lack of relevance can be our downfall. As learning professionals, you are consistently evaluated on your ability to remain relevant to any business - based on what is most important to that business - more than the quantifiable numbers we can put in front of our leaders.

What can we do to increase our relevance? I can tell you what we are doing at Yum Brands. All across the organization - from personnel to HR to talent management - we are repositioning practices that have been around for a long time to make them more relevant. For example, at Yum University, we're reframing the way we think about leadership development. We're thinking less about programs and more about practices and experiences that people need to be capable leaders at Yum.

Instead of putting emerging leaders into courses, or giving them a series of jobs, we put them into situations where they gain the right kinds of experience. And we are very explicit about the purpose of these stretch assignments. People know they are there to learn. We even go so far as to tell them that the work they do in these temporary roles is not as important as the learning.

This approach is much more relevant to how we operate than launching yet another program for emerging leaders. Showing a program's ROI is not necessarily an indicator of relevance, and I'm not alone in that point of view.

ASTD and i4cp did some research not long ago that shows that learning evaluation is generally failing in organizations today. Fewer than half the respondents agreed that their learning evaluation techniques were helping meet important goals. And an analysis of their spending showed that they seemed to be spending their evaluation money on the wrong things. The type of evaluation that most companies use - participant reactions - had the lowest correlation with evaluation success.

Learning organizations that are obsessed with ROI may have a relevance problem. They may be generating numbers to rationalize their existence or cover up the fact that there's no business impact to what they're doing. My point is, you may be spending time proving the value of your work in numerical terms, when your real value lies in the relevance of your work to some kind of purpose.

So, how can you demonstrate your relevance at work? First of all, you have to absolutely understand the businesses you work for or with so that you can deliver solutions that are relevant.

We've been hearing that advice for decades, through phrases like "alignment" or "seat at the table" - so it is surprising that so few learning professionals seem to get it. But people who do get it have a much easier time being relevant.

Take the common question: Should the learning function be centralized or decentralized to be more relevant? The answer to that question is "Yes." It all depends on the organization - what is does, how it interacts with its constituents, and how the leaders view the role of learning.

At Yum, we have a very decentralized learning structure. The way our business operates globally with multiple brands and thousands of different-size franchisees demands that we operate in this way. Does it have trade-offs? Sure. Would a centralized organization be more effective? Maybe. Would moving in that direction increase or decrease the relevance of learning professionals and learning in the organization? For us, it would most certainly decrease the relevance. We wouldn't be seen as tightly connected to the business as our leaders want us to be.

The value of a company's learning function sometimes depends on how people view its learning professionals. Some learning leaders can reshape a learning function that has grown irrelevant. In other cases, learning professionals might work where learning has value, but they remain irrelevant because their work is not aligned with purpose and what is important to the company.

At Yum University, we focus on three pillars: culture, leadership, and functional excellence. To my CEO, culture is one of the most important things about the business. The ROI on that could never be calculated, and I'll never be asked to do it as long as culture is a cornerstone of what's important. The work my team does remains relevant without having to quantify the value.

So step back a minute and consider what you're learning in the light of becoming more relevant back at work. When you encounter new ideas and new approaches, ask yourself how they might add value to what you do. How are they relevant to the purpose of your organization? How can you use them to reach your goals faster? How will you put them to work?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rob Lauber is chair of the ASTD Board of Directors and vice president of Yum! University at YUM! Brands.

This article is an excerpt of Lauber's keynote address at the 2010 ASTD International Conference & Exposition in Chicago.