Does this scenario sound familiar? You identify a common skills gap within your team and express your concerns to HR/Leadership. They agree and say they’ve seen a similar issue. You ask for support/funding to train your team. You know they need it, and HR knows they need it, but senior leadership is reluctant to allocate the necessary budget. After all, they just spent tens of thousands on an updated virtual video library for their LMS.

Often, identifying the skills gap and the training/coaching solution is far easier than getting budget to fix the issue. Additionally, using a basic ROI equation like ROI (%) = ((Monetary benefit – Training Cost)/Training Cost) x 100 is short-sighted.

To help you make the case for professional development, here’s a sampling of the ways training pays off in the organization:

• According to Bersin by Deloitte, companies which fell into their “high-impact” categories spent significantly more on training than average.
• 60 percent of those organizations said they outsourced some or all of their training instruction.
• 40 per cent of employees who receive poor job training leave their positions within the first year.
• Companies with 100-500 employees only invest 6 minutes of training on average per employee every 6 months.
• 48% of workers say that investing more in professional development is one of the highest-impact strategies to fight stress that their company can do
•  95% of hiring managers considered employee training as a key retention tool
• It’s not all about the money. 76% of employees want opportunities for career growth.
• 76% of millennials think professional development opportunities are one of the most important elements of company culture
• 18% of employees don’t feel confident that an employer will take care of them
• 70% of workers view training as essential for developing skills that directly relate to their role.
• 68% of the human resource professionals say last year they experienced recruiting difficulty and skill shortages for certain types of jobs
• 57% of workers ranked opportunities to learn and grow as one of the most important aspects of workplace culture
• Only 23% of workers stated that they viewed training as a way of increasing their skills before leaving for new employment.

The numbers don’t lie, and this cliché anecdote still rings true:

Two managers are talking about training their employees. The first asks, “Yeah, but what if we train them, and they just leave?” The second responds, “What if we don’t train them, and they stay?”