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Building a Business Case for Learning
Youmay already know the value that a learning program could bring to your company.Unfortunately, most organizations still don’t emphasize the importance oflearning and development as much as they should. The way people work, wherethey work, and how they work are all going through a major transition. Shiftingglobal market trends are pushing organizations of all sizes to quickly adapt intheir approach to business. Additionally, the people who make up the workforceare in a state of flux.
Considera few key trends:
- The types of jobs and skills needed are rapidlyevolving. Thirty-nine percent of employers report having difficultyfilling jobs due to the lack of available skilled talent. Workers withspecialized technology skills are in high demand and are well paid. (SeeReferences at the end of this article.)
- Global compliance issues are changing the workplacefrom the outside. While the skills needed and the people in the workforceare shifting, the regulations that dictate how companies operate are changingworkflows, oversight requirements, and processes. Seventy-five percent ofglobal compliance professionals say there will be an increase in regulatoryactivity and the average cost for organizations that experience non-compliancerelated problems is nearly $9.4 million.
- Baby boomers are exiting the workforce and millennialsare demanding professional development. Since 2011, approximately 10,000 babyboomers have turned 65 every day—and this will continue for the next 15 yearsuntil they all reach retirement age. Millennials will make up nearly half ofthe working population by 2020, and the most important factor in jobsatisfaction for this group is the opportunity to develop skills for thefuture.
Why learning?
Although the need may be clear, you may need to convincethe rest of your organization to jump on board. However, building a businesscase for a learning solution involves much more than a static business plan. Tounderstand what business case success looks like, let us examine what failurelooks like.
Failure takes place when the business case:
- Is not in line with strategic business objectives
- Lacks alignment with CEO and CFO goals
- Requests spending without financial benefitprojections
- Uses HR and learning industry terminology thatis a “different language”
These failures all have one thing in common; they relateto a learning-driven agenda and not to a business-driven agenda. To develop asuccessful business case, you must consider how people will perceive it and howit will impact the greater good of the organization.
Howcan you convince the rest of your organization to jump on board? Whether youknow it or not, you are about to embark on a huge marketing effort. In order todevelop a successful, well-rounded business case for a learning program, youneed to address business challenges, analyze current processes, identify organizationalneeds, calculate the impact of training and how those results will align withbusiness goals, and build alliances throughout your organization.
Define the business challenges
A wide range of business issues from changing market trendsto the multigenerational workforce can call for investment in a learning anddevelopment program. But at the end of the day, an organization’s performancehinges on the performance of its people. To maintain a competitive advantage,organizations must deliver learning opportunities to employees that increasetheir skills and knowledge so they can get better at their jobs, drive teamperformance, and foster leadership development. Not only will these initiativeshelp organizations achieve success, they will help cultivate an ever-greentalent pool from current and future employees to meet ever-evolving businesschallenges.
Identify current processes and organizational needs
Before you can properly prescribe learning as a solution toa business challenge, you must examine your learning strategy today. Where arethe inefficiencies? What are the organizational risks? What work isn’t gettingdone that should be getting done? Identify the checklist of specificpain-points and process inefficiencies that a learning solution couldalleviate.
Oftentimes, mandatory and strategic training requirementsexist in many different areas of your organization, and it’s your job todiscover and compile them. For example, compliance training, often the primarydriver for many learning solutions, is usually distributed in various forms amongmany different departments. Form a task force to find out who is carrying outredundant processes and activities. Look into the following areas:
- Human Resources: Onboarding training, workplace-conductcompliance training, and leadership development training
- IT Group: Systems rollout training,cybersecurity awareness, IT skills training, and internal process training
- Product Support/Call Center: Product trainingfor internal support and extended-enterprise customer training
- Marketing: Extended-enterprise prospect and customertraining
- Sales: Sales training, leadership training, and newproduct rollout training
- Alliances: Partner’s new product training andcompetency certifications
- Health and Safety Departments: Mandatorycompliance training
Taking the time to map out the various processes andtraining requirements across your organization will provide three majorbenefits: expose areas of redundancy and leverage opportunities, highlight themanual steps in each process (for example, email notifications or courseassignments), and reveal weaknesses in your compliance management and highlightareas of risk.
Building the business case
Now that there is a clear understanding of the necessaryconsiderations when building a business case, let’s talk about why learning isso important. Asuccessful learning program is all about knowing and growing the capabilitiesof your employees. It’s about the individual. You can’t hire or outsource yourway out of a knowledge or skills gap—and it is only going to become moredifficult as the economy improves and the demand for skilled talent increases.The only source of sustainable competitive advantage and control fororganizations is the ability to rapidly acquire and apply new knowledge and skills, which allows individuals to quicklyadapt to new challenges while spurring innovation and growth.
A successfullearning program is not just pushing static courses and content to employees. Itis an interactive, dynamic experience that helps organizations understand what skillsand competencies their employees have today and how they can help their peoplegrow and develop to build the skills and competencies needed to succeed in anincreasingly competitive global market. The business case should also highlight the longer term benefitsthat a learning program can have on organizational culture, employeesatisfaction and retention, and customer experience.
Financial analysis
Once you’ve mapped out the processes, met with other groups,highlighted redundancies, and showed inefficiencies, you can calculate how muchtime and money is spent managing, training, and reporting with current systemsand processes. With this information in hand, you’ll be able to present a casefor centralizing and automating these functions.
A solidbusiness case for learning should illustrate that developing internal talent iscost-effective to alternatives such as recruiting. Financial analysis should cover thepayback period, which outlines how long it will take to recover the initialinvestment of the learning program and the return on investment. This showcasesthe monetary impact you predict your investment to yield.
Risks
Discussions with subject matter experts and case studies canhelp determine any associated risks with the learning program. Using a singlelearning application to plan, implement, and assess learning activities willstreamline processes, automate administration tasks, and help reduce compliancerisks.
Building alliances
Who can tell you how your business case is perceived and howit will impact the greater organizational good? No single stakeholder can. Infact, according to the CEB, the average number of individuals involved in today’sbuying decision is 5.4. This buyingteam will often have differing agendas within it. That means that in order to buildconsensus for a learning business case, you’ll need to identify each of thebuying-team stakeholders and then secure their support by tailoring it to theirspecific priorities.
Who are your stakeholders and what are their priorities?
HR
HRis responsible for ensuring that theright people, with the right skills, are in the right roles in theirorganizations. They have to address employee engagement, generational workforcechanges, and a highly-distributed workforce (from globalization to contractlabor). A learning program should be an easy sell for the HR department.Building a learning-centric organizational culture will help attract, develop,and retain employees—meeting almost every goal of this department.
Learning and Development
Leaders in L&D have similar concerns to those in HR.They want to accelerate employee productivity and drive innovation at anorganizational level to meet current and future business challenges. Learningand Development will most likely buy into a learning program that is easilyimplemented, delivers a simplified, individualized user experience that drivesemployee engagement, and will contribute to overall business improvement.
IT
The IT department is tasked with offering safe, efficient,continuous, and seamless technology to support employees in the pursuit ofbusiness goals. They are the gatekeepers responsible for keeping theorganization on the cusp of new technology to stay competitive in today’smarket. IT’s concerns will focus on how easily this new learning program, andthe learning management system that supports it, will integrate with third-partyplatforms, including talent or workforce management systems as well as ERPsystems. Selecting a vendor partner that can seamlessly deliver key componentssuch as content and the learning management application significantly reducesthe threat of complexity with multiple learning vendors.
Business Unit Leader
Departmentheads and leaders are laser-focused on driving team performance to meetorganizational goals. They’re interested in having the most capable and trainedstaff on an individual level to support the group as a whole. A learningprogram that delivers training opportunities in the moment and allows employeesto get better at their jobs while doing them will win over business-unitleaders by helping their team operate efficiently and deliver outstandingbusiness results.
Procurement
Whileprocurement might not be your most enthusiastic ally, these folks cannot resista good deal. Simple, quantitative information will be your champion with thisdepartment. To win this group over, effectively measure return-on-investmentand demonstrate that a learning program is a quality investment and will savethe company money. Bringing in an off-the-shelf solution or partneringwith a learning vendor is more cost-effective than developing a custom solution.
You might consider uncovering shared goals between these stakeholders.Then, arrange a meeting to help the team understand how a learning program meetseach of their goals while also supporting the overarching business goals toenable a stronger, more unified, and supported stance.
Deliver the business case
Although the actual business plan will differ fromorganization to organization, the most important consideration for HR leaders isto ensure the outlined business challenges, organizational needs, learningsolutions, and expected gains are persuasive and coherent. Do they support eachother in a clear and understandable way? Do they tell a compelling story?
This is the stage you “sell” your recommendation for thelearning program, but rapidly evolving business challenges underscore the needfor any organization to build a learning-centric culture. If you follow theprescribed methodology for building a business case for learning, the pitchshould sell itself.
References
https://hbr.org/2014/08/employers-arent-just-whining-the-skills-gap-is-real
https://accelus.thomsonreuters.com/sites/default/files/GRC00814.pdf
https://hbr.org/2010/05/mentoring-millennials
https://www.hrbartender.com/2014/recruiting/developing-your-talent-costs-less-than-hiring/
https://www.executiveboard.com/blogs/when-emotions-impact-a-sale, June 2014
Formore tips on building a business case, download the free eBook Cloud-Based Learning Solutions: Making theRight Choice for Your Enterprise at www.skillsoft.com/ebook.
