Business Development
STARTING WITH
BY OSSAMA SAGHIER
Many years ago, I was sitting at my desk when I received a strange email from my supervisor, it was merely one question!
He said, "Did we meet ROI?"
My instant reply then was "What do you mean? We haven't met any ROI so far..."
I will leave it to your imagination to find out what his next response was.
Ever since that moment I decided find out more about Return On Investment and how it works: Is there a measurement tool for training ROI? Or can we simply convert training figures into monetary figures?
Technically, it's near to impossible to convert training figures into monetary ROI. I have sat with a mathmetician and tried! We started to count the variables that affect the business process in general and to identify those factors that have a direct and an indirect impact on the Revenue Generation Process.
The results were insane! We counted over 250 major variables distributed between areas such as HR, market variables, customer variables, product or service variables, after-sale service variables and many others.
To cut a long story short, if we want to measure the real ROI for any training, we should go through a process to identify the following:
1- Find out all the variables that affect your revenue generation.
2- Analyze those factors and assign each of them with a correspondent weight, not all of them have the same impact on revenue generation.
3- Measure the impact of training on each one of those variables.
This is a complicated process, even if you manage to do it one way or another, the resources you need to complete this "Challenge" will be substantial, very demanding and the cost will be very high.
28 | TRAINING MAGAZINE MIDDLE EAST JAN 2015
ROi