What to Do Next: Six Moves That Get You Off the Plateau

Rather than a single checklist: the right next move depends on which wall is holding you back, so the six moves below start with diagnosing that before acting on it.

1. Map your jagged profile. As finding two shows, the gap between your strongest and weakest dimension is more diagnostic than either number alone — and that stays true even once you're operating at Level 4 or 5. Haven't taken the assessment yet? Start here.
2. Find your wall before you act. If your strategy exists mostly on paper and hasn't translated into active leadership backing, you're facing the strategy-and-alignment wall — invest in building the case and the relationships that get leadership genuinely behind it, not just aware of it. If your team is doing solid work but can't demonstrate its impact in business terms, you're facing the quantifying impact wall, and that's where the next move should go.
3. Build a systematic way to identify learning needs. This is the single most commonly cited weakness in the whole sample: more respondents name Learning Needs Identification as their weakest dimension than any other. Start with an intake process that quantifies the business value behind each request, not just logs it.  Where the need itself is unclear, that often means investing in root-cause work rather than taking the request at face value.
4. If quantifying impact is your wall, invest there next. Building directly on the move above, a quantified need gives you the baseline your story of progress and impact gets told from. It's also the single biggest multiplier in the entire dataset — a 1.41-level lift across every other dimension once a team crosses from Level 1–2 to Level 4–5 on Learning Metrics. Nothing else we measured comes close to that return.
5. Invest in a collaborative learning approach. It's the factor that most reliably separates top-quartile organizations from bottom-quartile ones in our data, and — per finding six — that holds regardless of the size of the organization you're in.
6. Standardize and automate the busywork behind Training Processes, even after strategy and metrics are fixed. Training Processes is the weakest dimension even among the most mature teams in our sample, cited as the top bottleneck by over half of Level 4–5 respondents — and the fix isn't more strategic thinking, it's less time lost to scheduling, production, and coordination that a smart tool or a standard process could handle instead.

Next chapter: About The L&D Maturity Model