A recent study suggests that an organization can almost double its employee retention statistics by deploying corporate tuition aid - Wall Street Journal May 21, 2007. (Title: Corporate Tuition Aid Appears to Keep Workers Loyal)

One of the key responsibilities of senior learning executives is talent management. It is the theme of many discussions around the future of both the developing role and potential impact of having such a position within the organization. Recent studies show an alarming trend that within the next few years, attracting and retaining key talent will become more and more difficult.

Several years ago I was the CEO of a firm called Synergistics, Inc. We delivered onsite training that was paired with both tuition assistance and educational degree attainment. The "sell" of this program was very simple. It was a win-win solution for motivation. The corporation selected training that best matched the core-competencies it needed to have filled. The learners received tuition assistance and the ability to use that training to further their educational attainment. Both groups were highly motivated well beyond "just another training course."

Using this methodology, employees became much more loyal to their organization and tended to stay longer. The recent article in the Wall Street Journal reinforces this fact stating "Among employees hired the year after the program started, only about 33% of participants had left the employer within five years, compared with about 60% of employees hired within the same year who didn't use the tuition program."

Those types of results are dramatic. It doesn't take long to calculate the cost of attracting and training new employees versus providing tuition assistance to existing employees in order to find out the return on investment is significant. So why are not more employers using this tool?

I've heard a lot of excuses such as "We don't have the budget" "If we educate our employees they will take that degree and seek other employment - at our cost" and so on. The bottom line is that learning executives have not done a very good job of developing the value proposition to the organization. It can be numbers driven and even a small amount of tuition assistance can yield significant gains. Just ask my friend Ted Lehne at Delta Air Lines. He has done internal research to demonstrate that the retention statistics for even a small amount of tuition assistance can shoot through the roof. It works!