How To Get A Bigger Training Budget
As the financial year closes, it’s the time when we reflect over the training initiatives of the past 12 months. They might have gone brilliantly and shown you new opportunities worth investing in. Or maybe they didn’t go so well and they’ve highlighted a need for more training resource.
In either case, the training department could always do with more money. It’s not always easy to convince the powers that be. It’s especially difficult when you haven’t calculated the ROI from the training. Demonstrating a direct relationship between training spend and profits isn’t always possible.
In the absence of hard statistics, the knock-on benefits of training are important to highlight. Here are a few facts to help you out when you’re trying to get a bigger training budget.
1. Training Needs To Be Continuous
A training initiative will only succeed if the learners engage with it. With this in mind, releasing a monster eLearning unit every three or four months isn’t going to keep the learners returning. To create a real culture change, the training programme needs to form a part of every day. You need to ensure that the training team has the resources to support the training programme on a continual basis.
In his book ‘The Great Training Robbery’1, Michael Beer highlights the importance of embedding strong training within a positive learning culture. Without the supportive learning culture to back it up, it’s impossible to create long term behavioural change. Beer warns that failed training doesn’t just affect profits - it can have wider consequences, like triggering cynicism among the workforce.
2. Tailored Training Is More Effective
If you’ve used the same training approach for years, changing it might seem like a step into the unknown. However, by investing in a training programme that fits the users’ wants and needs, you can generate a much better return. GAME, a leading video game retailer in the UK and Spain launched a gamified, social online learning platform.
Since it was tailored specifically for them, GAME employees really engaged with the LMS. This learner engagement was reflected in performance and profits, with sales figures for certain product lines increasing by an average of 37% across trained stores.
3. Training Is Trending
Today’s businesses aim to provide some level of training for their employees. With the increasing need to plug skills gaps, these businesses spend more on training every year. In fact, year-on-year, the amount spent on training in the US is growing2. Luckily, studies3 show that the top performing companies spend more on training, than those who don’t.
Restaurant chain, The Cheesecake Factory4, invests about $2,000 a year in training each employee. Their investment ensures that staff retention rates are among the highest in the industry. They now make sales of over $1000 per square foot – that’s twice the national average.
4. Better Training = Happier Employees
In a knowledge-based economy, internal training leads to higher company profits5. Although profits are important, it can be harmful to focus too much on them. 31% of workers6 believe employers care more about profits than their employees. Building the training according to the employees’ individual training goals shows that their company is willing to help them grow and develop.
Since happy workers are 12% more productive7, it pays to give them a training platform that they can enjoy. It’s also important to show them what they can personally gain from the content. Even something as small as a virtual award can be enough to spur your learners on. These small victories add up to a happy training experience.
5. Training Forges Stronger Relationships
Investing in a collaborative learning platform can do a lot more than simply deliver training content. Giving learners a social space to share their knowledge has lots of other benefits. It gives the learners a sense of ownership over the experience, and it let’s you, the training manager, capture that intellectual capital that would otherwise be lost.
A more continuous training programme also fosters stronger relationships8 between employer and employee. Better relationships and a stronger culture can often be more valuable than enormous profits.
6. Training Reduces Staff Turnover
Despite alarming news of millennial job-hopping, most modern workers prefer to stay put, do meaningful work and improve their skills. 53% of millennials9 said they would stay in their current job if they could learn new things and develop. Investing in the right training lets you meet modern workers’ needs and hold on to that talent pool.
Discover Financial is another global company that successfully used brilliant online learning to boost their profitability. They overhauled their training programme to include a more appropriate range of media for their learners. This led to 6% increase in employee satisfaction and 42% less attrition10.
Final Word
The success of training doesn’t just boil down to a consequential profit. When you invest in engaging training that’s embedded within a supportive learning culture, there are more valuable prizes up for grabs. Even if this doesn’t generate an immediate profit, it encourages the behaviours that lead to a more efficient and more effective organisational culture.
Footnotes:
- The Great Training Robbery
- Spending on Corporate Training Soars: Employee Capabilities Now A Priority
- The Impact of Training and Development on Employees Performance and Productivity: A case study of United Bank Limited Peshawar City, KPK, Pakistan
- The Cheesecake Factory
- Can Employee Training Lead to Higher Profits?
- Why Empathy Matters In The Workplace
- Happiness and Productivity
- The Impact of Training and Development on Employees Performance and Productivity: A case study of United Bank Limited Peshawar City, KPK, Pakistan
- Millennials Desperate for Financial Stability, in Search of Employer Support to Get There
- Why Investing in Training Will Almost Always Give a Positive Return on Investment
