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The answer to learning excellence used to be engagement. Ask an L&D leader what keeps them up at night in 2026, though, and it's changed. Now it's proof.
According to Thirst's 2026 State of L&D report, demonstrating ROI has overtaken learner engagement as the profession's number-one challenge for the first time. Budgets are flat (when they aren't shrinking). Training spend sits near the top of the list whenever finance goes looking for something to put on the chopping block. The question a CFO asks is if the bottom line moved because of it.
Eight teams, eight kinds of learning excellence
Eight organizations just answered that question in front of an independent panel, and won. Between them they took home eight 2026 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards, across categories as different as compliance training and learning governance. What links the eight is how they framed the work.
Brandon Hall has judged these awards since 1993, longer than any program of its kind. The scorecard rewards fit to the business, program design, and delivery. But the category that decides most of them is measurable benefits. With training, you either moved a number leadership cares about, or you didn't. Every winner here achieved that considered proof point.
Seven Absorb customers, eight wins.
Winner | Award | The win |
PGA TOUR Superstore | Gold, Best Results of a Learning Program; Gold, Best Learning Technology Implementation | A double gold. PGA TOUR Superstore's training summit delivered stellar results: content consumption increased significantly year-over-year and retention among trained associates rose. |
Rho | Gold, Best Compliance Training | Rho's single, audit-ready training system keeps compliance airtight, holding audit findings at zero, cycle after cycle. A gold that speaks for itself. |
Straumann Group | Gold, Best Learning Governance | Straumann's governance model keeps learning accurate, accountable, and built to scale. A genuinely tough category, and a gold well earned. |
DHL Supply Chain | Silver, Best Learning Strategy | DHL Supply Chain's Joe Astell put it best: “A learning strategy can become far more than training delivery.” Now running across multiple operations and thousands of learners, that's exactly what it's become. |
Mitre 10 | Silver, Best Learning Technology Implementation | Silver for Mitre 10, honoring a learning technology rollout making a real difference for store teams across its network. |
Association for Project Management | Bronze, Best Association Professional Development Program | APM's learning platform, built around its own Body of Knowledge and Competence Framework, delivered numbers to match: course completions went up sevenfold and in-house content output doubled, all within a year. |
FPT Software | Bronze, Best Learning Technology Implementation | Bronze for FPT, recognizing the infrastructure behind fast, at-scale learning for its technology workforce. |
The pattern that you can steal
Read the eight together and there's a pattern that surfaces. If you're part of an L&D team, feel free to borrow it!
- Name the challenge. Write one clear sentence.
- Pick the metric before you build. Decide what proof will look like before launch, not after.
- Measure what the business tracks. Not courses launched or hours logged, but turnover, audit findings, member retention, revenue.
Most programs run this backwards. They launch first, then hunt for a metric that makes the results look good in hindsight. These eight inverted it. They chose the number that would prove the work succeeded, then built toward it. That's why, when the panel asked for proof, the proof already existed.
Learning leaders who win the budget argument measure the outcome their CFO already tracks.
What this list is really evidence of
Absorb builds the platform. These eight teams built the programs that turned into the proof. Watching what they did with it is the strongest case we know for treating learning as a business function with numbers to answer for, rather than a cost line waiting to be trimmed. Congratulations to every one of them on this outstanding achievement in learning excellence!
