Business Development
Think about the last time you ventured out to buy yourself an electronic device, home appliance or vehicle … what were the key things you factored into your decision making process?
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In short, you would eventually seek out the option with the best quality and hope that in the long run you get your money’s worth, if not better.
Similarly, every organization treats its training department as an investment opportunity and wants to ensure that the trainings offered to its staff are the best quality, most up-to-date and effectively designed to ensure a high return on investment financially.
ROI (Return On Investment) is treated as one of the key factors in the most initial processes of training – the creation and design of training content material.
When designing training material, one of the models used is the ADDIE model. This is a framework that represents the guidelines for effective training and performance support tools.
These include:
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The most crucial level is to evaluate the effectiveness of the training design. With the evaluation results received, one is able to justifying the cost to the training budget, training
methodology, and the use of time for the trainer and participants, which can be used as evidence for convincing stakeholders.
A positive or negative result on the ROI will automatically correlate to the assessment and structure of the training.
A simple tool to help understand how to calculate the ROI in any situation is:
In the above formula "Gain from Investment” refers to the revenue generated from conducting the training.
Return on investment is a very popular metric because of its versatility and simplicity. That is, if an investment does not have a positive ROI, or if there are other opportunities with a higher ROI, then the training should be not be undertaken and other options should be considered.
Normally, evaluators look for validity, accuracy and reliability in their evaluations. However, these goals may require more time, people and money than the organization has. Evaluators are also looking for evaluation approaches that are practical and relevant.
BY STEVE RE
24 | TRAINING MAGAZINE MIDDLE EAST JAN 2015
getting an roi
with TRAINING
BY DIAHANN CARROLL D'SOUZA