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.
by Victoria Clarke
by Alan Nelson
by Nicola Dann