Four Tips for Maximizing Your ROI on Employee Training

Four Tips for Maximizing Your ROI on Employee Training

According to Edward E. Gordon, PhD. in his Trainingarticle titled “Training and Talent Development Regain Momentum,” in 2017, employers spent 32.5 percent more on worker training than the year before, with total training spend amounting to $93.6 billion. This is unsurprising, since many companies are already having to retrain and upskill workers due to digital transformation, as well as the adoption of new technologies that are changing workers’ responsibilities.  

Of course, when your company invests in training your employees, you want to ensure that both employees and employer benefit from that training — and that requires a certain amount of planning. What follows are some tips to maximize your ROI on employee training:

  1. Offer training that aligns with business objectives. Before determining what training to offer, it’s advisable to analyze your organization’s skills needs, as Asha Pandey points out in her eLearningIndustryarticle “6 Tips to Maximize the Online Training ROI.” You should select training that will provide the company with those skills and help move the organization forward. 
  2. Identify employees who want to learn new skills and who will put them to good use. If you’re not offering a department-wide training, you should select trainees carefully. The truth is that not everyone wants to learn all types of skills, so you need to select people who are enthusiastic about learning and who will benefit from the training in their daily jobs. It’s also important to choose employees who are likely to stay with the company for a while — otherwise, an employee might leave and take the newfound knowledge to your competitor.
  3. Provide plenty of opportunities to put the new skills and knowledge to use. In order for your employees to retain what they’ve just learned, assign them projects or set them to work with technologies that allow them to practice what they’ve learned. If you’re pre-training people on technology that hasn’t yet been implemented in your company, it’s wise to schedule the training as close as possible to the actual implementation as possible. Otherwise, they might not retain the new skills.
  4. Get employee feedback on the training. When your employees have had the opportunity to complete the training and put it into practice, get their feedback by means of a questionnaire or survey. This will help you improve future trainings.

When you prepare your employee training properly, your company can achieve a good ROI in the form of more in-house skills and knowledge that can help it advance. And at the same time, by providing the right training to the right employees, you can also achieve higher engagement, increase job satisfaction, and inspire more loyalty to your company. 

Sources:

https://trainingmag.com/trgmag-article/training-and-talent-development-regain-momentum

https://elearningindustry.com/6-tips-maximize-online-training-roi