Nelson Croom's Blog

Return on investment in training

by Jacqui Nelson

I recently attended an event run by the British Institute of Learning and Development (BILD), entitled Return on Investment: Assessing the Real Value of Training.

The event was held at BPP’s training facilities in Holborn. There were four presentations throughout the course of the day, all interesting.

First up was Andrew Birch, Director of Sales for BPP Professional Development. Andrew had conducted some research into what people thought of ROI in terms of training and development and what he demonstrated was that everyone has a different perspective on the subject.

The thrust of his presentation was around why learning and development people needed to be more prepared to justify their actions in financial terms. He acknowledged that this does not always come naturally as those who go into learning and development roles are more likely to get a kick out of people and relationships than hard figures. A wonderful role play demonstrated this further.

His conclusion, I think, was that there is no easy answer to measuring ROI but that we shouldn’t give up trying. I’m not sure I agree about the latter. I can see that financial justification of training budgets is essential but I can’t help wondering whether we are barking up the wrong tree by trying to measure pure ROI – but that’s another blog.

Next was Jacquie Kelly from Jisc who talked about tangible benefits of elearning in higher education. It is difficult to draw conclusions on this presentation because she looked at should a broad range of different approaches but it is good to see the innovation that is happening in our academic institutions.

After lunch we had a real life example from a living and breathing learning and development person. It was excellent to see what Barclaycard are doing in terms of measuring the impact of their training on their business, and interesting to hear about the challenges that the team have faced.

Jo talked about the cultural shift required to bring about a more measurement focused approach. Not only did this require learning and development people to establish, at the outset of a project, what was to be measured and how, it also impacted on the manager requesting the training who had to be more clear and thoughtful about what change they expected from the training intervention. One of the key challenges for Jo and her team was to help managers articulate their needs in terms of how it would benefit the business, rather than just because it had always been done this way.

Finally it was the turn of David Vachell. David represented that rare combination of a learning and development professional who was extremely at home with figures. David shared some of the tools he had used in his various corporate roles to justify spend on training.

The premise was that learning and development suffers when competing for budgets because a. its perceived value isn’t great enough and b. that the return takes longer to happen than in other areas of a business. This delay realising the benefit/return on the initial investment is what leads to, David believes, the ‘feast and famine’ budget cycle so often seen by training departments.

The answer therefore appears to be easy; increase the perceived value of training and reduce the time lag to showing benefit. In practice it’s not so easy. The answer to the first, it was suggested, is to build a case for training starting with the impact it will have not the costs. The latter is difficult but by using interim measures, such as participant judgement, and communicating them widely and consistently you can keep stakeholders on board whilst you wait for the real impact to be realised.

It was an interesting day with good presentations. I came away still unconvinced that you can effectively measure the true ROI of all training interventions but I remain convinced that it is essential to think about training in terms of the impact it has on an organisation and how it lines up with strategic, organisational objectives. There is not space in the current climate for training for training’s sake. 

Gerberas, gerberas and more gerberas

by Victoria Clarke

First off, apologies for the blog silence over the last week or so – that’s because we’ve been busy preparing for Learning Technologies 2009.

If you’ve been keeping up to date with what we’re up to, or following the blog, you may already know that for the first time we’re exhibiting at Learning Technologies 2009, taking place on Wednesday and Thursday this week – if you’re there, come and visit us on stand 48.
 
The show opens tomorrow – and we’re all very excited. In fact, as a demonstration of the power of blogging I'm writing this from London's Olympia 2 (a hive of activity at the moment as all the exhibitors are setting up their stand displays).

To celebrate our presence, we’re offering visitors the chance to win a bouquet of flowers, to be delivered to the address of their choice. To enter, just come along to our stand (number 48 – did we mention that?) and give us your business card / have your badge scanned. There’ll be one draw on Wednesday and another on Thursday.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering how you’ll notice us – just look for the orange stand and the staff wearing yellow gerbera buttonholes. We hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it we’ll let you know all the news from the show on the blog and in our newsletter next week.

New Year - What will it bring?

by Alan Nelson

I promised last week, when reflecting on the year gone by, that I would share some thoughts on what 2009 has in store for us. I’m not normally one for crystal ball gazing, but it’s that time of year, when we inevitably look forward.

On the financial side, our year doesn’t end until March 31st. We generally know what we will working on for the next three months and have a pretty good idea of the following three and so we can already see that 2008/9 will be a good year for Nelson Croom. 2009/10 is coming together nicely as well and so we are cautiously optimistic about the future. I say this while touching several large pieces of wood, as I am sure everyone is doing right now. I am sure our business is not immune from a recession but our core markets of continuing professional development, compliance and distance learning are less likely to suffer than most and for some the switch to doing things online offers significant savings at a difficult time.

Technically I see us moving forwards in two directions over the next 12 months. Firstly, during the past year we have been incorporating more and more Web 2.0 facilities within our learning resources. These have been enthusiastically taken up by the communities of learners and in 2009 I see this becoming standard practice for the material we publish ourselves and a central part of many bespoke projects.

Perhaps less exciting, but no less important, we will continue to invest in the robustness of our system. During 2008 we had over 45,000 new registrations for courses, up 30% on the previous year. So we start the year with over 150,000 learners, and in 2009 I expect to add a further 60,000. That can’t happen without continual investment in the hardware, software and communications technology.

We have recently put plans in place to focus more resources on the development of our own courses. We already have a substantial publishing programme, but we aim to expand it significantly now that we have real experience of what the markets that we serve really want. Alongside this we will establish closer links with our partners and licensing organisations and to this end Rachel Bruce has agreed to take up the role of publisher, coordinating the development of new publishing and liaising with our partners to ensure they are get everything they need to provide an exciting service to their professional communities.

Finally, and perhaps best of all, is the prospect of all the new people I expect to meet in 2009. Last year saw us start to work with more new clients and partners than ever before and I expect that to be repeated, and indeed surpassed, in 2009. For me the best part of our work is meeting new people, finding out about their organisations, and thinking through how we can create a really compelling way of helping them to achieve their objectives. Some of these conversations lead us to exciting commercial possibilities and others are rewarding because of the obvious benefit they provide to their target audience. All offer us the privilege of a window into someone else’s world.

So hello to everyone that we haven’t yet worked with but will get to know in 2009. It will be good to meet you!

Another new year – a time for reflection

by Alan Nelson

At this time of year we inevitably take stock, looking back at the year gone by and forward to the year to come.

2008 was good to Nelson Croom. Firstly on the financial side, revenues grew year on year by over 20%, creating a profit that we will reinvest in the development of the business. The performance was consistent too: all four quarters were profitable in their own right and generated cash, creating something of a war chest for the future.

On the technology side, the functionality of Imago continued to evolve. In particular we developed, in partnership with the Pensions Management Institute, facilities to enable students on distance learning courses to submit assignments and notify their tutors that they are ready to be marked.

The system ends the year more robust as well. A new generation of hackers, targeting specifically ASP systems with SQL Server back ends like ours, was successfully repelled.  We have invested in new state of the art hardware with different parts of Imago now running on separate parallel servers. Crucially the software engine has also been updated to SQL Server 2008, which will increase speed and facilitate quicker development of new functionality.

The new capacity created by the upgrades is timely – we now have over 4000 learners a month registering for our courses. Whether they are studying for professional exams, completing compliance programmes or maintaining their professional knowledge through CPD courses, all have come to expect a quick and reliable service that is easy to use and which can be relied upon to store their critical data.

On the publishing side, we continued to expand our range of white label CPD courses. 2008 saw our courses offered to the members of a dozen new partner bodies, expanding the range of participants in the publishing project and creating an ever more robust publishing model.

Our client list expanded too, with more new relationships than ever before. We now have unparalleled experience of working with professional bodies and a real critical mass of projects in financial services, health, law and the third sector. Projects with organisations as diverse as the British Library, FP Advance and the Institute of Fundraising have all forced us to come up with new solutions for learning design. I have been particularly pleased with the development team’s ability to be creative and maintain consistently high standards when under pressure of workload.

All this was borne out towards the end of the year, as we conducted a survey of our clients and partners. We asked people to grade us between 1 (very bad) to 5 (very good) on all aspects of our service, from initial conversations through development to ongoing support, as well as on how well our technology meets their needs. Some specific scores were outstanding, but more important was that we scored over 4 on every question. I was particularly pleased to see that 100% of respondents would recommend us.

So 2008 was good. We can justifiably claim that the success of the company is based on the high standards of service we have achieved in all aspects of what we do, which bodes well for the future.

So what about 2009? How do we plan to cope with the ever expanding number of users of our system? What new opportunities will emerge for providers of professional development services? What will the economic downturn mean? I will be back on the blog in the next few days to look forwards at the year to come.

What did you do over Christmas?

by Alan Nelson

December is always a busy time for Nelson Croom. On the development side, clients often want projects completed before the end of the year, and on the user side, learning never seems to stop for the festive season.

In December, 3900 people logged into one of our courses, with over 2500 new registrations for courses. To put the level of activity this represents into context, the system recorded over 83,000 new answers to questions! That’s real engagement from real people.

As always, our CPD courses were busy as people used the service to comply with regimes that require a specified number of hours of professional development each year. Accountants were once again the most numerous group with over 100 registrations between Christmas and New Year.

Last year we had six Irish accountants register for a course on Christmas Day. This year the prize for earnestness (or perhaps for dysfunctional family life!) goes to the users of the British Library courses on Intellectual Property. Clearly the economic downturn has not dented the entrepreneurial zeal of two budding inventors who registered on the 25th.

Compliance was also on people’s minds. Over 250 people from one of the leading clearing banks completed a competition compliance course in the month.

These groups of learners all have very different motivations. At one extreme, those completing compliance courses do so because they have been told to. At the other extreme, the British library IP courses are used by people who are entirely self motivated. In between are the professionals completing their CPD. Their activity may peak at this time of year because of the requirements of their professional body, but their selection of particular courses is based entirely on professional interest.

What is common in all these cases, is that the anytime, anywhere provision of online learning enables people to achieve what they want to when it suits them – even if that is on Christmas Day! Set this alongside the extremely high levels of satisfaction reported in our recent survey and we can enter 2009 confident that we are providing a service of real value to professional communities.

Author day

by Nicola Dann

Last time I wrote an entry (I'm not a blog productive as others at Nelson Croom!) I told you about the work we are doing with the ADI and the challenges of persuading the thirteen appointed authors to come up with the goods. As the deadline draws ever nearer, both the stick and the carrot are being used to get in the last pieces of content so we can move on to the reviewing stages.

After an author get together in December 2007 to introduce all the authors and project members to each other, we decided to hold another Author Day last month to give them all an update on where we were and allow them to moan to each other about how much I nag them. The carrot was a day out of practice or office in London, and a free lunch. Who could resist? Well, as it turned out quite a few of them, as we didn't end up with the numbers we'd hoped. But for those who did make it we had a highly productive day. So what's the secret of making a day like this so productive? This is where the stick comes in. Once we had lured them in to the room with the carrot psychology, we locked the door and wouldn't let them leave until each author had written a couple of reflection activities for their course ...

The production of knowledge content from these authors isn't a problem. It is when we ask for activities where the learner has to reflect that it becomes more difficult. So we found ourselves in a situation with courses rich in knowledge, facts and information (which is crucial for learning) but without the added rigor of activities which will require learners to do or think of something in a practical situation and then examine the knowledge implicit within it. These activities ensure the online learning experience is rounded, holistic and relevant to what dentists will encounter with patients. It will lead them to being able to successfully apply knowledge in a given scenario, then analyse the results and reflect on the outcome, leading to a continual cycle of learning and improvement.

So you'd think that on their Author Day we allowed the authors to take the time to try out writing activities, then allowing pause for thought and time to reflect on how they had done, followed by the opportunity to refine their ideas so they felt a sense of achievement with what they had produced. Well, no. It was back to the stick psychology where they were told to each write two activities or they'd be home late that evening. I have to say that under pressure they all came up with great activities that will be appearing in their courses soon. Sometimes brute force is what is required. And they'll all have had plenty of time to reflect on it over the festive period!