What is the ROI on professional training?

By Andy Hart, Professional Academy's Learning & Development Advisor

How investing in professional training drives engagement and increases profits for Professional Academy’s clients …

Professional training: what’s the ROI? Great question! Speak to any L&D specialist and they’ll probably tell you that there isn’t any way to accurately measure the ROI of professional training. Speak to us, or any of our clients, and we’ll show you plenty of evidence that our professional training provides ample and speedy ROI, in employee engagement and financial terms, from both the individual and the organisational perspective.

In fact, we promise that investing in professional training with Professional Academy could deliver a virtuous circle, with both your employee engagement scores and your profit margins continually expanding.

Here’s how:

This virtuous circle isn’t something we’ve simply copied and pasted from a course handbook or an academic textbook. It’s something we’ve designed after consulting with many of our corporate clients across the globe  about how our service was providing ROI to them in real terms.

Commission us to develop and deliver a bespoke professional training programme, leading to globally recognised qualifications for your people,  and this is what you can expect to happen.

The Professional Academy ROI Experience:

Step 1: You quickly notice improvements in your employee engagement.

Step 2: You are attracting the best talent, allowing you to choose rather than ‘settle’ for new staff. You are reducing employee churn and addressing any previously perceived ‘skills shortage’. You may also be maximising the potential of cheaper social network based recruitment channels with your training programme giving your people something to share. In short, you have improved your recruitment.

Step 3: Simultaneously you have retained talent. You are now reducing recruitment and induction costs as well as delays in joining (with 3 months notice becoming common), whilst increasing inherent company knowledge and cultural understanding, and, of course, organisational resilience.

Step 4: Before you know it you have maximised potential.

Step 5: Maximising potential means you have increased your competitive advantage: you are seeing evidence of: enhanced capability, efficiency and effectiveness. This is improving your organisational confidence in taking risks whilst increasing the quality of your output and lowering your cost-base.

Step 6: You are realising the benefits of the fact that the qualifications offered by Professional Academy are based on National Qualification frameworks from Level 2 – 6, with all the competencies within your framework aligning to our courses and all our learning outcomes effectively being competency statements. You have future proofed your competency framework.

Step 7: Hey, guess what? Whilst all this has been going on your profits have been going up, as have your employee engagement scores...

Enough about us for now! Other independent case studies, and academic research, have been published around the subject of ROI on professional development recently, including formulas for calculating it (see The Phillips ROI/abdi Model, Kirkpatrick’s learning evaluation model and Phillips’ ROI methodology).

Take a look, these may aid your calculations, discussions and decisions. However, if you’d like guidance on what the real ROI could be for your organisation, please download our Training & Development brochure, in which we explain the four reasons why it’s vital to invest in staff development and share some customer stories alongside details of our bespoke training and development solutions.

Or simply contact me, Andy Hart. I’m here to help.