Investing in training is investing in your company. There's a direct relationship between an organization's training programs and its growth, competitiveness, safety record, and financial success. Here are 10 reasons training in general, and safety training in particular, is a good investment:

1. Safety training reduces accidents and protects employees from injuries and illness, saving the company the cost of lost time, diminished productivity, and increased insurance premiums.
2. Training also assists in compliance with OSHA standards and decreases the chance of being cited and fined for safety and health violations.
3. Training in general increases employee job satisfaction, motivation, and morale.
4. Happy, motivated, safe, and well-trained employees are loyal employees, which means turnover goes down.
5. Employee training and development provides you with a pool of skilled and knowledgeable people who can move up in the organization and fill critical jobs and perform critical functions.

Why It Matters... According to ASTD research: Companies that invest in employee learning have higher productivity, revenue growth, and profit growth than companies that do not. Employee training is a fundamental determinant of customer satisfaction, sales per employee, and market capitalization within an organization. Employee satisfaction with opportunities for learning and development is one of the most important predictors of whether an employee will stay with his or her current employer. Opportunity for training is one of the top three things people consider when deciding where they want to work.

6. Training helps your organization ride the crest of technological change and innovation.
7. Well-trained, highly skilled employees are more efficient, productive, and creative.
8. Training helps you manage risks such as s*xual harassment, workplace violence, and discrimination.
9. A trained workforce provides the human resources to expand into new markets and seize opportunities in a highly competitive and fluid global economy.
10. Training helps develop a positive organizational culture in which confident, knowledgeable, creative employees are poised to provide superior products and services to customers.

Five ways you can increase the payback of your training dollars. To make sure your employee training is always successful and cost-effective--whether you're training for safety or to develop other critical competencies--you need to:

1. Make training on ongoing process, and reassess training needs frequently to make sure you're meeting today's needs, not yesterday's.
2. Encourage employees to talk about their training needs and request additional training.
3. Provide employees with opportunities to use newly learned skills on the job.
4. Make sure your training is comprehensive, interesting, and interactive, and gives employees the chance to practice new skills in a safe setting.
5. Send employees back to work with learning aids such as checklists, step-by-step instructions, and safety reminders that help them safely and effectively transfer newly learned skills to their job.