As with any journey, even the GPS is useless without identifying the point of origin. We know where we need to go…our stakeholders have an idea of what they want from our efforts…but we need to establish a current state of performance measures to establish a “before” benchmark if we hope to provide evidence of improvement in future state outcomes in our “after” benchmarks at Levels 3 & 4. Neglecting this level of assessment dramatically limits our ability to show evidence that L&D contributed meaningfully to the bottom-line…which by the way is atypical of a cost center.