Running Training Like a Business

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Preface

Let’s talk about your investments—specifically, your investments in training.

Businesses invest vast sums of money and significant portions of their productive capacity in training and development (T&D). It’s common for top corporations to provide from 30 to well over 100 hours of training to each employee every year. Smaller businesses frequently invest even more heavily in training as a percentage of payroll. Reliable sources estimate that, overall, annual U.S. corporate investments in T&D exceed $56 billion.¹

Impressive as that figure is, we believe it is really just the tip of the iceberg. (We’ll tell you about the hidden costs of training in Chapter 3.) When executives first glimpse the true cost of training, beyond the mere ...