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Loren Sanders
Loren Sanders is a Strategy Consulting Partner at WeLearn Learning Services, where she works with learning and development leaders to diagnose and mature their learning strategy. She led the development of WeLearn's Learning Strategy Scorecard, an assessment built on data from more than 100 L&D organizations across 27 industries.
Why Most L&D Teams Are Stuck in "Limbo"
Loren's scorecard research found that roughly 80 percent of organizations score at the "reactive" or "operational" level on a four-stage maturity ladder, with only about one in five reaching "strategic" or "transformational" maturity, meaning most learning functions have moved past pure firefighting but haven't yet earned a genuine seat at the strategy table. Her sharpest distinction is between reporting and measurement: "reporting will tell you what you did, measurement will tell you whether it mattered," and she argues that story, not course-completion data, is what actually moves L&D from a cost center to a strategic partner. She encourages L&D leaders stuck at the operational stage to reverse-engineer their programs from what employees are actually measured on at review time, rather than starting from training content.
Topics Loren speaks on
- The four-stage learning maturity ladder, and why you can't skip rungs
- Measurement vs. reporting: the difference that gets L&D a seat at the table
- Building L&D governance when ownership is unclear
- Moving learning from a cost center to a strategic business partner
- AI readiness as L&D's lowest-scoring maturity dimension
Sessions with Achieve
Loren is a featured presenter on the Achieve webcast "What 100+ L&D Leaders Reveal About Learning Strategy Maturity & What We're Doing About It" (February 11, 2026), presented in partnership with WeLearn Learning Services alongside Roberta Gogos of Lighthouse Research and Advisory, Karen Ganitsky of 3M, and Jennifer Myers of the Center for Internet Security. In it, she walks through the four-stage maturity ladder and the six most common strategy gaps her research uncovered, and moderates a real-time conversation with two L&D leaders putting the findings into practice.
Connect
Want more on what it actually takes to move your learning function from operational to strategic? Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network.