Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1534385
APRIL 2025 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 95 Plaza: One critical intangible is long-term employee retention. While it's an intangible, you can measure it. You can easily know whether 100 people come in today but only 50 remain by the end of the year. You can calculate how much each of those training programs cost in hours and resources for the 50 people who le, easily showing the direct training investment that was lost. Add to that the productivity and downtime caused by the lack of workforce and training new employees. If you lose someone who's been there longer, that loss compounds over time. Retention as a benefit of quality training holds a very high dollar value because people throw away a lot of money on poor training. However, studies by Deloitte, Gallup, and oth- ers have shown that people who receive qual- ity training are much more likely to stay with the company. Quality training that helps people excel in their job performance increases the likelihood they will deserve that raise or promotion and stay longer with the com- pany. You should measure the effectiveness of your training because it will help you retain your workforce. Another tricky intangi- ble is engagement. How do you measure that? We survey trainees about how they like their jobs and how they can use the new skills they learned in their jobs. ose things are subjective, but in the aggre- gate, you get a picture of engagement. Train- ing has been shown to increase engagement. Another intangible is management buy-in. If the manager is not on board with training, they probably aren't right for the company. We talk about retention as an intangible, but in a climate where we face a shortage of skilled labor, retention seems to be a sig- nificant tangible benefit, though perhaps it's harder to measure the ROI. Plaza: We all need to train our managers. It's an aphorism now, but people do leave because of their bosses. Especially in a technical indus- try, it is easy to promote based on current job performance, but if someone moves into man- agement and does not possess the necessary people skills, who is at fault? I couldn't agree with you more. So, why is now the time to consider workforce training and ROI? Can IPC help companies embark on a workforce training ROI journey? Plaza: It's always the time, but we only notice it when we feel pressure based on economic indicators and sales forecasts. at's when people start looking inward, and we know we need to do something. Now is one of those pressure points. If you are in charge of training in a corpo- ration, don't be fearful about measuring ROI. Many people fear measurement because they worry they will end up with data to show that their program or initiative is not working as intended. Most of the time, though, what you find is not necessarily about the training or the learning objectives but the application, the transference of the knowl- edge and skills gained in train- ing. If it helps identify a spe- cific manager who's not on board with the training, now you can address and fix the problem. Regardless of what the data says, you need to measure it contin- uously so you know where both the value and deficits lie. Tim and Carlos, thank you. You bring it right down to the things that manufacturers best understand, and care about most. Plaza: You're welcome, Marcy, and thank you again for the opportunity to talk about it. PCB007 Click here to access the paper. " You should measure the effectiveness of your training because it will help you retain your workforce. "