Training and professional development opportunities are powerful tools that can tip the scale of inclusivity at your workplace. According to the 2019 Training Industry Report, the total training expenditures in 2019 in the U.S. was $83 billion, with the six-year average of training expenditures sitting roughly at $78 billion. With these price tags, training is an undeniable force across every industry, which, in turn, gives it powerful leverage toward building inclusive companies, industries, and economies. However, I am not referring to the obvious and necessary diversity, equity, and inclusion anti-racist trainings that many companies have been seeking and engaging in. I am referring to all trainings—from onboarding and technical skills to new products and services and leadership development.
The Multiplier Effect
When training is done right, the return on investment has a multiplier effect—at the employee level, the company level, and the industry level. And when training is used as a tool for equity and inclusion, the impact also has a multiplier effect—at the individual level, the institutional level, and the systemic level. How do you know if your workplace is maximizing training as an inclusion tool?
First, examine and disaggregate your company’s data to better understand who receives training as a professional investment at your workplace and what results from those trainings. What does it look like over the last 1, 3, 5, and 10 years? What are some historical trends? What do the data tell you when you look at the gender breakdown? The age breakdown? The race/ethnicity breakdown? And once you disaggregate the data, what patterns emerge? Does it seem like one group tends to receive leadership trainings above others? Ultimately, you want the distribution of training opportunities to match the diversity and inclusion imperative of your talent development pipeline, no matter which way you disaggregate the data.
Second, once you have a clear understanding of the patterns of who receives training at your company, you want to unpack how decisions are made for training expenditures. Which trainings are designated as “rite of passage” or universal where employees are automatically assigned it as they advance at your company? How broadly advertised are training opportunities and which opportunities are hidden and go through a company gatekeeper? Who are those opportunity gatekeepers and what type of employees do they tend to advocate for or overlook? Does the process of allocating training resources allow for a broad representation of employees to access comparable training resources? If not, diagnose if the roadblocks are due to tacit behavior, explicit policy, implicit bias, or a combination of the three. Only after naming and addressing the roadblocks will your company be able to build a training resources allocation process that aligns with its inclusivity goals.
Lastly, conduct a historical audit of your company’s procurement process to understand the types of vendors and trainers your company tends to hire. Does your company have a request for proposal (RFP) process for contracts or does it rely on referrals? Does your company ensure minority-owned businesses are represented in its vendor list? When selecting training providers, does the company prioritize trainers’ skills, competencies, and results over brand recognition and marketing pitches? When $7.5 billion is spent on outside training products and services annually in the U.S., it matters that your company plays a role in ensuring that it hires and pays a diverse and inclusive list of training providers.
Conducting the audit described above will help your company uncover promising practices that build toward inclusivity and reveal hidden exclusionary practices that lead to overlooking and underinvesting in women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) talent. Companies in the U.S. have the potential and opportunity to transform the economic force of the training industry into a powerful catalyst for institutional and systemic inclusion. Who is up for the challenge?
AiLun Ku is the president and CEO at The Opportunity Network. Prior to this position, she worked at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the Research Center for Leadership in Action, among other social impact organizations.
