Want to protect your talent investments from budget cuts? Prove their value.

There’s no shortage of examples today’s talent leaders can point to in order to show the major impact potential of a well-placed talent mobility investment. 

What’s harder to find is a solid set of bottom-line proof points that leaders need in order to understand the value of their investments and to grow their impact.

This leaves skilling and internal mobility efforts vulnerable to being treated as a cost center when companies tighten up the belt.

What proof points do talent leaders need?

Collectively, these bottom-line proof points comprise a given solution’s return on investment (ROI). Below are 5 key metrics that are essential to calculating the ROI of a talent investment. We’ll explore each in further detail below.

• Reduced turnover: Lower separation rates, particularly in priority and hard-to-fill roles
• Talent attraction: Higher volume of higher-quality candidates 
• Brand: Halo effect from employee evangelism, recognition as an employer of opportunity with a strong, differentiated EVP
• Other factors such as DE&I outcomes: Engagement and mobility rates for underrepresented populations
• Internal mobility: How much and how often employees make lateral and upward moves into priority areas and roles

But if ROI means so much for talent solutions, why is it so hard to find information on it? There are two main reasons:

1. Companies struggle to isolate the impact that individual components in their HR stack make across the metrics that unite talent, mobility, and skills, and –
2. The partners they’re relying on for upskilling and career mobility solutions can’t actually prove they drive bottom-line value.

Guild can.

The latest report from Guild’s Business Analytics team breaks down the return on investment (ROI) companies see with Guild, and how we approach measuring the 5 key ROI metrics mentioned above. Explore key insights below. 

Measuring ROI right now is critical

Putting a dollar value next to career mobility efforts is challenging for a number of reasons. 

For one, many programs are nascent, which can make it hard to provide enough data to evaluate their impact.

Relatedly, some companies think about talent, upskilling, and internal mobility as somewhat separate strategies — that can cause leaders to miss critical connections between them when those programs are evaluated.

And after years of crises from a global pandemic to The Great Resignation, overwhelm and burnout among HR professionals is palpable.¹

Despite challenges, the reality is that knowing what programs are doing for your organization’s bottom line can help talent leaders disentangle them from the broader macroeconomic outlook. It’s harder to treat a money-saving undertaking as a cost center than a program with unknown bottom-line value. 

Over 6 out of 10 recent and near-graduates aspire to advance with their current employer.

Guild member survey

Beyond that, measuring the ROI of career mobility investments provides talent leaders with important headlights into areas where impact can be improved or scaled for the benefit of their people. 

Understandably, a lot of the buzz around talent mobility is focused on its high potential to address critical skills gaps. But strong talent mobility solutions don’t stop at skills. Done well, they drive impact across multiple critical business areas of focus.

5 proof points: Here’s what goes into measuring ROI.

The components that make up ROI from Guild’s solution span a number of critical talent and business outcomes, including:

• Reduced turnover
• Talent attraction
• Brand
• Other factors such as DE&I outcomes
• Internal mobility

Scroll down to explore definitions and examples for each proof point.

1. Reduced turnover

The cost of turnover varies by role and level, but at scale, high turnover is a huge drain on both budget and morale.²

Several hard costs go into calculating cost of turnover, including recruiting, background checks, orientation, training, equipment, and the premiums companies pay for temporary workers while the role is vacant. 

There are additional, harder-to-measure costs that have a major impact, such as reduced productivity while a new hire learns their role, reduced productivity from peer employees who have lower engagement or are overloaded due to the vacancy, or lost sales due to reduced customer service. 

Improved retention is a major driver of ROI for employers that partner with Guild. This is a result that can be observed early, even before employees have completed their upskilling programs:

Across Guild employer partners, employees enrolled in an education program were 50% less likely to separate from the company in 2022 than non-engaged employees.³

Guild internal data

Retention represents between 65 and 85% of the ROI companies see through their Guild partnership — and this facet of ROI alone fully covers the cost of the Guild benefit.⁴

2. Internal mobility

Think of career mobility as any job movement that makes the life of an employee better. 

Ultimately, this is the point of the talent investment for employers: strong internal mobility points to a culture of opportunity, as well as the efficiencies that come from developing talent and filling roles from within.⁵

It’s also the endgame for employees: opportunities to grow internally with employers is a major driver for talent retention and attraction — lack thereof is a reason not to bother. 

With Guild, employee learners are seeing a 2.2x higher internal mobility rate than their peers who don’t engage.⁶

3. Talent attraction

A greater number of high-quality applicants is a force multiplier for your hiring funnel. 

A quick way to measure which of your investments are driving attraction is to survey new hires. How many of them cite a specific benefit or program as a reason for accepting their offer letter?

 Guild’s employer partners who survey applicants and new hires found that high percentages of these populations cited Guild’s benefit as a reason for applying and joining. 

In the absence of a survey, we use a proxy measure.

Guild’s analytics team found that of all member profiles created with Guild in 2022, 39% were from employees who had been with their current employer for fewer than six months.⁷

Given the time it can take for onboarding and eligibility to kick in at certain employers, this indicates that those employees likely knew about Guild’s platform before joining the company — and were keen to start using it. 

4. Brand perception

Making smart internal mobility investing decisions is a differentiating play to build your brand as an employer of opportunity.

Though employees are clear about their expectations for education and growth opportunities, many companies are struggling to deliver them: A recent study showed that just 38% of HR professionals have formal talent mobility programs and policies in place.

A further 37% said they do this informally (read: definitely no ROI measurement).⁸

Companies that partner with Guild know the importance of a differentiated employer value proposition: 100% of our employer partners that launched 18+ months ago have incorporated Guild into their ESG / CSR reporting.⁹

5. DE&I outcomes

A strong way to evaluate whether a specific benefit is driving impact for historically underrepresented groups of people is to compare the demographics of who is using the benefit with company demographics on the whole.

Doing this puts context around representation, and it can help companies uncover areas where actions can be taken to improve representation (e.g. through targeted marketing or refining the learning upskilling programs employees can access). 

Guild and our employer partners share a commitment to create opportunities for their entire workforces — not just some. As such, close attention is paid to utilization demographics.

For example, David Mafe, UC Health’s Chief Diversity Officer, recently shared that Black and Hispanic employees were utilizing the benefit at nearly twice the rate of their population within the organization.¹⁰

“When we look at the demographics, our Hispanic and Black employees are participating at almost twice the rate of their population within UCHealth. So, it’s been really exciting.”

David Mafe, Chief Diversity Officer, UC Health

What optimizes ROI?

There are four key ways that Guild works with our employer partners to optimize their investments.

1. Prioritize the populations who will see the most impact.

We work with companies to eliminate the barriers that prevent people in frontline roles from accessing opportunities.

One critical way this is achieved is through fully-funded Tuition Assistance, meaning employees don’t have to pay up-front and wait to be reimbursed.

All of our employer partners offer some form of tuition-free programs to their workforces. 

2. Make sure employees get credit for the skills they already have.

Guild’s unique credit for training efforts with some of our learning partners help your employees earn credentials faster for less by acknowledging the skills employees have already gained through their on-the-job training.

On average, Guild learners realize 1.6x more transferred college credits for Guild Learning Marketplace learners in bachelor’s degree programs that accept transfer credits than the national average, aided by Guild coaching and resources for earning on-the-job training credits.¹¹

3. Offer programs where employees are most likely to succeed.

The programs in Guild’s Learning Marketplace are designed and optimized to meet the unique needs of working adult learners.

Guild offers over 1800 programs across 96 fields of study, including preparatory programs like English language learning and high school completion.

Sixty-three percent of all Learning Marketplace programs are aligned to the top 10 major occupation groups ranked by growth.¹²

4. Provide ongoing support to employees while they learn.

Better academic outcomes realized through inclusive design and program catalog curation are further optimized by Guild’s coaching services.

For coached vs. self-serve learners, Guild helps drive higher persistence: Guild learners have a 21% higher bachelor’s program first year retention rate and 49% higher on-time graduation rate in non-degree programs.¹³

Bottom line? The ROI from your talent investments should be measured – and net positive.

Measuring your talent investment impact through ROI empowers a better understanding of how well the solutions you trust are helping you meet your talent goals.

Guild works with companies to ensure the return they are seeing is a net positive — both in terms of employee impact and bottom line value. 

1. Fortune, “HR leaders are getting battered by crises—and it’s leading to burnout and higher turnover,” 2023
2. Sloan MIT Management Review, “Toxic Culture is Driving the Great Resignation,” 2022
3. Guild’s internal data over the last 12 months as of 01/01/2023 from employers who have provided the required data for at least 13 months post launch
4. Average of all Return on Investment analyses conducted by Guild for employer partners as of 01/01/2023
5. Forbes, “Is Internal Mobility The Answer To Talent Shortages?” 2023
6. Guild’s internal Guild’s internal data over the last 12 months as of 01/01/2023
7. Guild data over the last 12 months as of 01/01/2023 from employers who have provided the required data for at least 13 months post launch
8. CompTIA, “Workforce and Learning Trends 2023”
9. Guild employer 2021/2022 ESG or CSR reports
10. UC Health Today, “It’s ‘school, school, school’ for nursing assistant now that UCHealth has pledged $50 million for employee education program,” 2022
11. Guild's cumulative internal data as of 01/01/2023 compared to National Center for Education (NCES) Statistics report, August 2014
12. Guild Learning Marketplace data as of 01/01/2023 compared to BLS data as of September, 2022
13. Guild’s cumulative internal data as of 01/01/2023