Learning and development programs can represent a significant budget investment – and for good reasons. Research consultancy group Accenture found that for every dollar invested in training, companies received $4.53 in return, which is a 353% return on investment (ROI). Learning, development, and training efforts can go a long way toward improving your employee skill sets as well as your bottom line.
But what if your ROI is lagging? What do you do if you don’t see the effects of your learning programs – driving the results that make your investment seem sound? There are a few ways to improve your learning and training ROI and prove the value of your learning investments to your organization.
What’s the Real Reason for Your Low L&D ROI?
The first way to raise your ROI is to troubleshoot the underlying reasons for under-performing programs. Most times, explanations for less-than-ideal L&D ROI can be boiled down to a handful of straightforward, solvable items:
- The content isn’t relevant for the audience: Too often, organizations are creating content and curriculum that doesn’t actually serve their leaners. Trainers may jump on a buzzword or trend that they feel is crucial in order to stay ahead of the curve, like agile project management methodology. Because they read the case studies of its effectiveness in other organizations, they invest time and money into launching a development effort around training their teams on agile project management and then fail to see the expected results. Why? Because what’s valuable to one organization isn’t necessarily universally useful.
- The content is incorrectly or inefficiently delivered: When it comes to effectively engaging learners and making sure that the content connects and makes an impact, delivery matters. There are plenty of training categories – like sales training – that get better traction when used in social scenarios with role-playing. Other learning and development programs work best when led by an instructor and involve group collaboration and participation across the classroom. If you don’t want your training to fail, you need to make sure that you’re using the right course type and delivery method.
- The content isn’t supported by the organization or aligned to the overall goals: The biggest and most important way to connect ROI to learning strategy is to understand how well that strategy is built to support the overarching goals of the business as a whole. If one of the business priorities is to increase customer retention, then a learning and development program that helps grow a customer-centric culture and empowers customer service agents and front line employees will be a well-aligned learning initiative that’s likely to drive more of the desired business outcomes.
Finding the most relevant content, pairing it with the right learning experience, and making sure both support the big picture business goals is every L&D leader's toughest and most important challenge. Getting that recipe right will help drive the most ROI from L&D initiatives.
Ardent consults with every client in order to recommend the best solution to achieve results for their unique business goals. If you’re curious how we can help you drive your ROI as well as your business results, schedule a call with us for a complimentary consultation on your learning and development strategy.
