Soft Skills ROI: what if we could quantify the impact of well-being on the bottom line?

All of today’s ROI calculations related to professional training are based on our understanding of technical skills. Nevertheless, soft skills are the skills that most impact professional success and fulfillment. If the skills we are taking into consideration are not those that most impact business, are we then measuring the actual ROI? Are we even able to calculate ROI for professional training that tracks the most important company’s performance indicators?

The problem we are trying to solve is the following: nobody has found a way to quantify human skills, therefore such skills couldn’t be included into the equations that quantify the KPIs related to the well being of a company. We know with extreme precision how much the time spent by an engineer developing a product impacts the bottom line, but we know nothing about the contribution this person has on the overall well-being of the company, which goes beyond financial performances and indicators.

Now, thanks to Wisepath and its SkillQuest platform, we can measure soft skills. Being able to measure them enables us to plan and effectively direct training. Training actively improves the skills being exercised and these improvements have a significant direct or indirect impact on the overall performance of the company. Additionally, such training will also profoundly impact how pleasurable, stimulating, and positively challenging the workplace becomes.

For the first time, we have the opportunity to quantify companies’ performances through KPIs based not only on technical data but also on human data. Additionally, we can create new KPIs, devise new formulas to quantify a number of aspects of the well-being of the company, this time tied also into the amount of “leadership” the company enjoys, into its ability to solve complex problems, or to be resilient in the face of change.

These new KPIs, though, need to be tailored around the culture and the business of each company. This can only be done with the cooperation of the customer because the correct calculation of the ROI requires access to data and information that only the customer can provide. In a few years, provided we generate and collect the right data and enough of it, AI will help us automate this process but today we need to define the methodology that tells us which data to look for and how to measure it for each customer.

Wisepath proposes a new approach to professional training, one in which customers do not simply select a ready-made solution to transfer some knowledge to the workforce. We want our customers to be deeply involved in this research in which, through trials and (just a little) error, we will be able to equip the company with an automated system and a methodology capable of measuring and understanding the true performance of the company, all the while training its workforce on a number of soft skills.

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