Grand Junction, Colorado was a lovely setting for the WCHRA conference last week.  I gave the opening keynote address, a three-hour marathon session which covered the financial costs and benefits of workforce engagement and retention, highlights of our 2008-09 Employee Hold’em National Workforce Engagement Benchmark, and of course…  “the game”, now played by over 11,000 people.

As is often the case, the “cost of training” came up in many of our discussions.  As I mentioned in the seminar, it’s not the cost of training that encourages companies to cancel it, it’s the inability of human resources to show the ROI of training.  Consider the following:

• Training enhances employee retention. A Louis Harris and Associates poll has found that among employees who say their company offers poor or no training, 41 percent plan to leave within a year. Of those that say their company offers excellent training, only 12 percent say they plan to leave.

• Untrained employees take up to six times longer than trained ones to perform the same tasks.

• Studies show that in-house training costs 73 percent more than outsourced training.
• A study by the American Society of Training and Development found that firms who invest $1,500 per employee in training, compared with those that spend $125, experience on average 24 percent higher gross profit margins and 218 percent higher incomes per employee.
• Just a 2 percent increase in employee productivity has been shown to net a 100 percent return on investment (ROI) in instructor-led training.

If you fail your youth, you fail your future….