December 11, 2000, 4:38 PM — There's little debate that companies should invest in their people by offering
training and other educational opportunities. But such investments are usually swept
under the rug as expenditures best kept from the eyes of frugal shareholders. Now an
effort is afoot to prod companies to view employee training as an investment -- even to
report it in their financial statements alongside R&D and capital expenditures. New
evidence suggests that the money will come back in enhanced shareholder value.
That's the conclusion of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD;
based in Arlington, Va.), a professional association of 70,000 corporate-learning
specialists around the world. It routinely collects detailed training data for its
benchmarking service, and by last fall had accumulated enough data from 575 US
companies between 1996 and 1998 to show a link between training expenditures and total
stockholder return (TSR). The study, entitled "Profiting from Learning: Do Firms'
Investments in Education and Training Pay Off?" provides new ammunition for anyone who
needs to make the case for employee training programs.
Why training pays
ASTD defines a company's TSR as the change in its stock price plus dividends, calling
it the best measure of a stockholder's actual return. ASTD found that companies that
spent $680 more per employee per year than the average company increased their TSR by
six percent the following year. These top companies had a 37 percent TSR, while
companies investing below the average (ASTD doesn't give a figure for this average in
its report) had an average TSR of 20 percent, compared to a 26 percent return of the
Standard & Poor's 500 index. The top quarter of the study group spent $1,595 per
employee, while the bottom quarter spent just $128. ASTD can't reveal the companies
that participated.
Skeptics might hunt for other causes for these figures. Perhaps
productivity-enhancing IT expenditures boost TSR, or perhaps some industries simply
have inherently higher returns. But the ASTD applied "a more sophisticated statistical
model" that employed multivariate regression and still found a positive effect from
training. With employee education factored in, the model's ability to predict TSR
growth improves by 50 percent.
The study notes that training probably influences TSR indirectly by positively
affecting other "productivity indicators" that the market recognizes. "We do know from
our research that employee retention is higher at companies that have significant
training efforts," says Mark Van Buren, ASTD's director of research and the study's
coauthor. He adds that "more of the firms that lead in terms of investment in training
are in the IT sector."
While it's too early to say which types of training are most effective, the data is
yielding some answers that ASTD may soon publish in a report, Van Buren says. "The
training content that matters most is IT training," says Laurie Bassi, another study
coauthor. Bassi is director of research at Saba Software (based in San Francisco), a
maker of corporate-training software. This holds true for both major types of IT
training -- technical training for specialists and the basic computer-skills training
offered to all employees. Bassi adds that preliminary indications show that so-called
e-learning -- courses delivered over the Internet or corporate networks -- may
not be as effective as classroom training and other traditional educational techniques.
However, Internet-delivered training is a lot more economical
SEC reports
Having established training's ROI, ASTD advocates that publicly traded companies report
training expenditures in the quarterly and annual financial reports they file with the
federal Securities and Exchange Commission. This would accomplish two important things,
the study says: it would provide investors with new information that could improve
their portfolio performance, and it would give managers increased confidence that they
would be rewarded in the marketplace for putting money into human capital.
A related advocacy effort is underway at the Brookings Institution (based in
Washington, D.C.), which will soon publish a report, entitled "Unseen Wealth,"
detailing the conclusions of a task force studying the importance of intangible assets
in today's knowledge-based economy. The report was cowritten by Steven Wallman, a
former SEC commissioner; Bassi is chairperson of a subgroup that worked on the
human-capital component.
