Don’t Give Up On Measuring ROI for Training

Your leadership wants performance - not training.  Can you prove (either before or after) that the training you propose will produce real business results that matter?

The challenge most learning practitioners face is isolating the impact of training when there are so many moving parts.  But do not give up. You can still provide meaningful data that will help persuade senior management and your target audience that investing in the right kind of training will have the business and performance impact they seek.

It is true that in every training initiative there are multiple internal and external factors that influence the outcome. But isn’t this true of just about any project undertaken in a business setting? Activities complement and affect one another. But you can still look at individual influences and draw some intelligent and correlated conclusions.

If for instance you trained sales reps to sell more effectively and then revenue increases, there could be multiple reasons: general improvement in the economy, product improvements, changes in territories, timing, competitor missteps or one big client purchase. But certainly new skills and processes have their place in this mix. Understand and cite the probable complementary factors. Correlate high and low adopters and compare their performance working within similar constraints.

Even though training, alone, may not have been the only cause of the improvement, you can isolate the impact by taking into account the factors that matter most.