Aligning Training to People Engagement

I was raised in the early part of my career working for a training company-1990's. The company training products were state of the art and we trained over 400,000 people. What we never were able to do was measure the effectiveness we had on the workforce post training. We trained people just for the sake of training because the perceptions were that 'trained people would improve performance'.
In the 2011 era, albeit in a different format, we now discovered that pre-measurement of the level of alignment of the workforce is necessary. Training is best served with a workforce that has passed a higher "workforce engagement threshold" than those that have a lower score.
Aligning the training to people "engagement" requirements provides a measurement mechanism to help ensure the training is sustained, takes hold to improve the culture, the manager skills and styles and more. In fact the training content should serve as the means of helping to grow and align the employee competencies to better serve the client/customer, teaming for better performance, and alignment to the corporate mission.
So, before training, get a measurement of the people's engagement, to include the culture, manager and leadership skills and styles, process, awareness of the company mission and whether customers needs are being met. First fix any significant misalignments discovered from the measurements. Then select a training tool kit that trains with a purpose of fulfilling the company mission with a workforce committed to performance improvement. The ROI will then be justified.