Return on Training Investment

Published in the Nothern Territory News, Wednesday 6 April 2011

Training should play a critical role in all organisations; positive training outcomes lead to enhanced employee and customer satisfaction and in time greater profitability. Investment in your staff through training offers a number of benefits that include increased morale and retention (very important in Darwin’s transient employee market), improved performance, productivity and activity. Training is the key to remaining competitive while providing positive outcomes to your bottom line.

To make the most of training opportunities and to maximize your training spend you must ensure that all training outcomes are clearly linked to your business goals and objectives. Getting value from training is easy when you take the time to consider what you want to achieve and how the training outcomes will be applied on a daily basis in your business. There are some general principles that you can adapt to ensure that training for yourself and your staff results in improvements within the workplace.

Training that adds value is generally integrated with your business systems (performance management, strategic planning and career development initiatives); it is planned around workloads and clearly linked to workplace outcomes. When training is used solely as a reward or its goals aren't clear to all concerned, positive organisational impact is questionable.

A key component of any training program is that of follow up and support, there must be an avenue for training recipients to ask questions, clarify any concerns and most importantly apply what they have learnt. Management must ensure that personnel are empowered to utilize their new skill set and that individual workloads allow sufficient time to put theory into practice.

Obtaining the most from training requires integration, planning, follow-up and infrastructure. While getting value should be a shared responsibility on the part of attendee(s) and manager, the manager plays a critical role in helping to create the conditions under which training will add value. To ensure that you get value from your training investment, identify development needs of staff on a regular basis. Use your performance management system and your strategic planning processes to integrate HR development with individual and organisational needs. Training will most likely add value when the goals of an individual and the organisation coincide. Training that was previously viewed as just a "day out of the office" can easily be a day that that returns efficiency and financial gain to your organisation.

Article by Alison Hucks, Principal @ Avant