What do CFOs think about L&D? Leveraging the CFO w/Keith Keating

Billions of dollars are spent each year on training the most important organizational asset: employees. However, employees are resigning from organizations at an unprecedented rate. Organizational leaders understandably want to identify the benefits and quantify measurable outputs resulting from training initiatives, but many L&D leaders are not successfully executing the task in a meaningful way relevant for one of the most important, and often overlooked, L&D stakeholders - the chief financial officer (CFO). As a result, L&D continues to be an “at-risk” function, often defunded during economic downturns or cost-savings initiatives.

The CFO is considered a business partner of all functional departments and interacts with all leaders in the organizational value chain with the budgeting, measuring, and reporting of all activities that support and drive organizational value creation. If L&D is creating value for the organization by training its most important asset, the question is where do CFOs see L&D in the value chain, or do they? And how can L&D leverage CFOs to further the L&D strategy?

Dr. Keith F. Keating, a recent doctoral graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Chief Learning Officer program, has created an enlightening and insightful session for L&D practitioners alike to gain a deeper understanding of the belief’s CFOs have about training along with strategic and tactical ways to strengthen the relationship with the CFO including strategies to increasing the budget for L&D.

Dr. Keating will be sharing data uncovered through the following research questions from his doctoral research:

1. What beliefs do CFOs have about training?
2. To what extent are CFOs engaged with the training function?
3. What influences the training budget?

This session provides a body of research to support L&D practitioners on the quest to advance awareness for CFOs on the value of training and the importance of the inclusion of training as a priority in organizational strategy. This session can help empower L&D practitioners by providing insight and awareness into how the CFO views the training function. This information can enable the Training function to strengthen the relationship with CFOs, leading to an increased awareness of the beliefs about training, opportunities for greater investment in training for continued employee growth and development, and stronger organizational performance. After all, CFOs and the Training function ultimately work toward the same goal: creating value for the organization.

In this seminar, participants will learn:

• Insights into the belief’s CFOs have on L&D
• Strategies L&D should consider strengthening the relationship with Finance
• Ways to be better positioned to argue for stabilized or increased L&D funding
• How to use this data to integrate L&D further into organizational strategies

ATD Talent Capability Model

Building Personal Capability: Communication, Lifelong Learning

Developing Professional Capability: Evaluating Impact

Impacting Organizational Capability: Business Insight, Data & Analytics, Future Readiness

With a career spanning over 20 years in learning & development, Keith Keating is a passionate advocate for the importance of learner-centricity while enabling, encouraging, and empowering talent to take control of their future through lifelong learning. Keith holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate with distinction from the University of Pennsylvania.

Keith specializes in:

• Designing and executing global innovative large-scale talent learning strategies and workforce transformations
• Assembling and leading high-performance motivated teams
• Cultivating global strategic partnerships and cross-collaboration across organizations to understand and solve challenges