Budget is a persistent problem for learning and development teams. Securing funding to maintain and expand operations is a constant struggle. While cutting costs is a tempting—and sometimes necessary—solution, it’s rarely sustainable. Ensuring budget negotiations go favorably requires showing training’s impact to the entire organization. Ensure a healthy financial future for L&D with these five strategies:

1. Increase organizational influence.

Training is typically undervalued by the organization. Many business leaders see it as an expensive necessity to meet regulatory requirements, which encourages them to minimize its budget.

Defending your budget requires proving that training operations are a strategic asset worth investment. Link training initiatives directly to the achievement of key business goals. This step ties the success of the business to L&D funding.

2. Automate basic tasks.

Training operations require many basic tasks, such as communicating with learners and updating course offerings. Highly skilled training professionals spend time on necessary but basic work, decreasing team productivity and effectiveness. Implementing automation tools requires initial investment but creates immediate and lasting returns by freeing up skilled employees to focus on higher value tasks. With more time to devote to strategic planning and data analysis, your employees can raise training’s return on investment (ROI) for the business.

3. Increase the reliability of training data.

The disconnected nature of most learning tech stacks results in the need to maintain databases in multiple systems. The output from those systems then must be manually integrated, which can introduce duplicate entries and human error. Errors in data create short-term disruptions and long-term inefficiencies. For instance, duplicate database entries can skew statistics and mislead strategic thinking. Instead, invest in a robust and connective data management architecture; this strategy pays dividends by preventing expensive mistakes.

4. Develop data-fluent staff.

Data from training operations can provide a wealth of insights that can be used to diagnose and address inefficiencies and vastly improve your operations. It can also continuously improve the quality of the training being delivered, increasing your ROI year after year. Conducting the necessary analysis requires cultivating advanced skills among employees who are fluent in data management and analysis and supporting those professionals with easy access to the data they need.

5. Budget for agility.

Planning is crucial, but the best plans assume that things will not necessarily happen as planned. Something unexpected is going to happen to your business. The key to strategizing for an uncertain future is to remain agile so that unexpected events don’t paralyze the L&D team.

So, budget with the unexpected in mind. Of course, it can be difficult to reserve funds for a completely unknown use. For your training team to respond quickly and decisively to change, have some margin built into the budget to make the situation less disruptive and reduce the need for sudden, ad hoc funding requests that make the team look unprepared.

Transforming training into an attractive area of investment for the business can pay off. Let these tactics guide you in increasing the value your training team can deliver and communicating that value to the business.