If you are struggling to get the resources you need to develop your people, it's time to get some confidence and use hard data to help you present your case. Other managers within the organisation justify their budgets and existence – so can you! Here's how to

Whether you are responsible for company-wide L&D or just your own team, make sure that you can get the resources that you need and don't just accept that training gets cut. L&D and HR people worry that because they cannot show direct causal links between programmes and business results, they have no hard evidence of impact or value. In fact, no one in business ever has perfect 100% links between cause and effect, they just have reasonable estimates.

So when you are asked to justify your training budget, here are 6 points to keep in mind:

The Board wants to hear how the organisation is delivering its goals and building future capacity. A marketing director will get up and talk about how marketing programmes have impacted market share, not about how many press releases were issued.

Make sure you focus on how your training impacts the bigger picture, not how many training days were delivered at what cost. The 3C Activity Analytics tool creates a simple but powerful ‘big picture' of training impact – try out our free demo version.

The value of most organisations is in their people, not the plant and equipment – and there is a lot of data available to support this (contact us for the detailed facts and figures).
Substantially improving people's performance through your training programmes is usually the single best way to raise the value of an organisation.

No manager, not even a sales person, can ever say that one action or programme was 100% responsible for a particular outcome. For example, very few sales people realise the contribution that branding, product quality, distribution strategy etc make to a sales outcome.

You don't need to prove your training programme is 100% responsible for a change in performance. Focus on the key areas of impact and use the visible improvements in these areas to show the value of your training.

In general, the better people perform, the more revenue there is per employee. Profits per employee are one of the key factors in determining share price.

By training your people to be better and more productive workers, you can make a significant difference to this number.

The training budget is usually the first to be cut, because senior managers think it won't make any difference to business performance. You KNOW this is wrong! But, you may not be able to show a causal link between a specific programme and a specific cost saving or revenue (although often you can in practice).

By linking your training programme outcomes to your organisational goals, you can indicate what the organisation RISKS by not training. The Line of Sight Wizard tool can easily help you make these links and produce reports that will help give you a voice in the Boardroom.

Often sceptics are basing their assumptions on opinion and prejudice, rather than fact.

When someone asks you to prove that a training programme made a difference, a good estimate with supporting hard data is all you need. If you are challenged, ask the sceptics to produce data supporting their theory that training makes no difference.

You do a good job, you know you do. So be confident and stand up for yourself in business terms.