Why Personalized Professional Skill Development Yields Better ROI

     

In our series about the ROI of better writing, we’ve been assessing the impact that improving writing skills can have on business outcomes.
  • First, more skilled writers can generally produce written documents faster. That speed increase can reduce labor costs that are surprisingly substantial.
  • Second, that time saved can do double-duty, because it can be re-allocated to other activities. Staff who spend less time writing can spend more time earning revenue.
  • Third, better writing is more successful at convincing prospects to become customers, which means the team’s overall conversion rate increases – boosting revenue, funding, and engagement.
Today, we want to look at this question of ROI from a different angle, however. It’s pretty clear that strengthening one’s writing skills leads to desirable and often quantifiably beneficial outcomes. But what kind of writing training produces the best results? After all, options abound: Even here, though, there’s a clear winner: nothing beats dedicated training. Here’s why.

1: Other training is too expensive relative to what you get.

No investment will yield dividends if you overpay for what you get. Academic training in particular tends to be very generalized. That means you can end up spending a lot of time and money on the education, only to learn a lot of grammar that’s more interesting than useful and without learning business-specific skills that are key to transforming writing into results.
 

2: The training isn’t designed to maximize improvement.

This is true of both academic and generic writing training modules: they’re lecture-oriented, with limited practical exercises and very little (and sometimes zero) feedback. However, real-time input, comments, and feedback are pivotal to mastering the skill and retaining it over time. This is because most academic and generic programs are meant for mass consumption and thus offer little to no individual attention to program participants.
 

3: The training isn’t tailored enough to meet unique needs.

Every organization has different goals when it comes to written documents. Generic and academic writing training might – if you’re lucky – touch on the specific kinds of documents you produce or address your idiosyncratic objectives. But again, these kinds of courses are designed for mass consumption. They likely won’t even mention the kinds of documents you produce – proposals, research reports, presentations, sales documents, etc. – much less actually incorporate your organization’s own writing into the coursework for maximum impact or adapt their courses to your needs.
 
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