TRAINING or VACATION?

Would you rather pay for a two-day off-site leadership training program or purchase a weekend vacation package to Venice?


It sounds like a silly question, right? We’d all choose the vacation. But why do we laugh, smirk, and really think it’s such a silly question? If we truly believed that the training “worked” and would make us better, more productive leaders, wouldn’t it be the right investment? After all, being a better leader could surely lead to a promotion in the near future that could mean an increase of $25,000 in annual salary. This could mean ten trips to Europe! The real problem is that deep down, we may all harbor a little skepticism (or a lot) over the ultimate payoff of training and that’s because we’ve never been bombarded (or even slightly peppered) with the evidence of impact and ROI. 

So what’s the problem? Why do employees and their businesses end up with nothing to show for this huge multimillion dollar investment they make in training? Why aren’t organizations making an aggressive and determined attempt to measure and report the true benefits of their training programs?

The short answer is simple—they lack the expertise and confidence to present their results to senior business leaders. In a recent study, it was estimated that over 95 percent of organizations feel the real need and urgency to demonstrate the impact and bottom-line value of training, but less than 5 percent feel confident in their ability to measure and report that very same business impact.

The paradox here is that ROI numbers are so important to the business that most training organizations are too afraid to present them. They want to get it right so bad, and they are so deathly afraid of getting it wrong, that they end up presenting nothing! This paralysis and lack of data is quickly interpreted as ineffectiveness and only fuels the already prevalent notion, especially amidst the more skeptical business leaders, that most employees’ training doesn’t “work” and may just be a significant waste of time and money. 

Perhaps one day, after we've truly started measuring and evaluating the impact of all our training initiatives, and convincing both business leaders (and ALL employees for that matter) that training is in some cases a tremendous investment with incredible returns, maybe then we can ask the "training or vacation" question again.  And we may not ever get employees to stop laughing at such a ridiculous set of options altogether, but if we get them to pause one second longer or laugh just a little bit softer, perhaps we've done our jobs and contributed to the "measurement movement".