Be a feisty L&D Manager - even if it's not your job!

Whether you are responsible for company-wide L&D or just your own team, make sure that you can get the resources that you need and don't just accept that training gets cut. L&D and HR people worry that because they cannot show direct causal links between programmes and business results, they have no hard evidence of impact or value. In fact, no one in business ever has perfect 100% links between cause and effect, they just have reasonable estimates.

So when you are asked to justify your training budget, here are 6 points to keep in mind:

1. Give the big picture not the detail

The Board wants to hear how the organisation is delivering its goals and building future capacity. A marketing director will get up and talk about how marketing programmes have impacted market share, not about how many press releases were issued.

Make sure you focus on how your training impacts the bigger picture, not how many training days were delivered at what cost.

2. People make the difference

The value of most organisations is in their people, not the plant and equipment – and there is a lot of data available to support this.

Substantially improving people's performance through your training programmes is usually the single best way to raise the value of an organisation.

3. No-one is ever 100% accurate

No manager, not even a sales person, can ever say that one action or programme was 100% responsible for a particular outcome. For example, very few sales people realize the contribution that branding, product quality, distribution strategy etc make to a sales outcome.

You don't need to prove your training programme is 100% responsible for a change in performance. Focus on the key areas of impact and use the visible improvements in these areas to show the value of your training.

4. Productivity is a good measure

In general, the better people perform, the more revenue there is per employee. Profits per employee are one of the key factors in determining share price.

By training your people to be better and more productive workers, you can make a significant difference to this number.

5. Stand up for yourself (and for investing in people)

The training budget is usually the first to be cut, because senior managers think it won't make any difference to business performance. You KNOW this is wrong! But, you may not be able to show a causal link between a specific programme and a specific cost saving or revenue (although often you can in practice).

By linking your training programme outcomes to your organizational goals, you can indicate what the organisation RISKS by not training.

6. Challenge the sceptics

Often sceptics are basing their assumptions on opinion and prejudice, rather than fact.

When someone asks you to prove that a training programme made a difference, a good estimate with supporting hard data is all you need. If you are challenged, ask the sceptics to produce data supporting their theory that training makes no difference.