L&D departments battle for limited resources. A notable 47 percent of L&D professionals report that a lack of financial support is significantly hurting their organization’s learning effectiveness. To keep stakeholders invested and advocate for a budget, L&D leaders must demonstrate their role in strategic innovation and illustrate how they support business objectives in a competitive market.
1. Align Your Training to Organizational Goals and Metrics
Corporate training exists to develop skills and competencies that support business growth. Yet less than half of L&D leaders report that their company’s learning strategy aligns with business goals—unsurprisingly, only 6 percent found poorly aligned L&D efforts to be effective.
To prove the significance of L&D’s ROI, it’s essential to match learning initiatives to measurable business goals and outcomes. L&D leaders must establish clear channels of communication with business units to identify their target objectives and key results (OKRs) or key performance indicators (KPIs) and align training programs to support these goals. For example, could a more streamlined onboarding process for new sales representatives lead to faster productivity to help the team exceed their monthly goals? Could customer success training help reduce support tickets by 10 percent to save 200 working hours per month?
Work with business unit leaders to establish a baseline metric for success prior to any training program. This way you can measure attributable growth once employees put their learning into action.
2. Tie Training to Employee Evaluations to Demonstrate Individual Growth
Beyond departmental goals, individual employee KPIs and other performance measures included in employee evaluations are a powerful way to target and improve isolated skills gaps that add value to your business.
Talk with people managers to discover what metrics they use to determine employee performance. In some positions, like sales, metrics are readily available to calculate a quick ROI for improving specific outcomes. Other roles might measure more qualitative skills, like leadership or collaboration. Remember that training is part of a symbiotic relationship—identifying where training did and didn’t help employees provides insight into how to improve your own L&D approach as well.
3. Track How L&D Supports Employee Satisfaction and Retention
People are seeking purpose in their work now more than ever, with 59 percent of workers identifying professional development opportunities with superior company culture. L&D is in the unique position to influence employee satisfaction and help organizations retain top talent—both compelling metrics to prove its ROI.
Work with your people experience team to incorporate L&D feedback in employee satisfaction surveys. Ask people managers what career development resources are most requested. By enhancing career development training, you’ll not only retain more employees but attract high-quality candidates—a priority in today’s competitive market. Talented prospective employees want to work for companies that support employees beyond a salary alone.
4. Continuously Improve the Cost Effectiveness of Training
While it’s important to shift the narrative away from L&D as a cost center by proving the additive benefits of your training, there is always value in continuously innovating to reduce costs while maintaining quality. In-person training depletes as much as 85 percent of each training dollar, and growing hybrid and remote work environments make the traditional method of live, in-person training impossible to scale affordably. One of the most effective ways to cut L&D costs is to adopt on-demand training.
Reduce the need for in-person courses by producing video training to roll out across you organization and recording live training for later access. Moreover, on-demand video training transforms your L&D initiatives into evergreen assets that anyone in your company can revisit; this allows you to scale programs and significantly boost the ROI of training production.