Training ROI
Do you measure the return on investment (ROI) for your personnel training and development programs? If you are like most career colleges, you are probably very good at calculating the ROI for your various advertising programs but have never measured the ROI for your training programs. Right?
Is Your Institution Compliance or Quality-Driven When it Comes to Training?
In fact some schools view employee training as a cost item needed to meet compliance requirements for professional development and continuing education. They ramp up their employee training programs just before their state license or accreditation is up for evaluation and renewal. And many of these “compliance-driven” institutions find the cheapest way to provide the training to their employees with no consideration for the usefulness of the training. So instead of providing timely and effective training to enhance employee and organizational performance, they end up spending a significant amount of money with no return on investment.
My question for these compliance-driven institutions is this:If you have to provide professional development opportunities for your employees to meet your compliance requirements, why not do it right to get bottom-line results? State licensing bodies and accrediting agencies have established professional development requirements in an attempt to further increase the quality of school operations. Their intent is not to simply increase your cost of operations. If done right, training should increase the quality, efficiency and profitability of your operations.
At the other end of the spectrum, I have seen many "quality-driven" schools that view training as an essential component of their continuous improvement plan. The leaders of these institutions are completely sold on the value of training and development to the point that they don't even feel the need to measure their training ROI. They are convinced that timely and effective training is needed to ensure quality and profitability. They believe they are getting a good return on their investment and see no need to go through the trouble of calculating the actual ROI. Naturally, these quality-driven schools automatically meet the compliance requirements set forth by their licensing and accrediting agencies.
Measuring Training ROI
So whether you are a compliance-driven or quality-driven school, you are probably not measuring your training ROI. The truth is that it's not so easy to measure the ROI for training programs. Just think of the systems and procedures you need to have in place to compare and evaluate different advertising campaigns. Conceptually, the same approach is needed for evaluating and measuring the results of various training programs.
Measuring training ROI is good business practice. Knowing the financial return on your training investments will allow you to select and implement the right programs at the right time to improve your bottom line. To help our sector better understand the link between training and performance, the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE) initiated a research program to study and document the impact of training on performance. Working with training ROI experts and a team of career college executives, CEE's research program included the development of specific ROI methodologies to measure the impact of faculty training on student retention.
See the results of the Imagine America Center for Excellence in Education ROI study
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