Pay for Learning — It Pays

In the throes of the recession, when other companies were slashing their learning budgets and restricting or suspending tuition reimbursement funding, insurance agency Mutual of Omaha maintained its tuition reimbursement program.

The company provided 100 percent reimbursement up to $150 per credit hour at the employee’s school of choice, with an annual maximum of $3,600 for employees working 30 or more hours per week.

Employees could select any course relevant to their job or that would be beneficial in helping them advance professionally and become well-rounded employees.

People are a topic of great interest in the U.S. today — particularly how people are a company’s most important asset. Corporations started to figure this out for a number of reasons: baby boomers aging, a withering talent pipeline to succeed them, a growing fear of a lack of knowledge transfer, heightened global competition and a roller-coaster economy.

Mutual of Omaha recognized this early, and in 2008 put in place a quantitative study to monitor the impact of its tuition reimbursement plan on key performance indicators such as career mobility and retention. The study was intended to enable better management of employee development.

The study’s methodology was based on observational statistics. Data from study participants is matched to compare and contrast differences among them. A subsequent statistical analysis was centered on general linear models (GLM) — statistical models used in behavioral and cognitive psychology. Through the use of GLMs, researchers aligned the effects of independent — the tuition reimbursement plan — and dependent variables — Mutual of Omaha’s key performance indicators, career mobility and retention. Analysts looked for interactions among variables to make predictions about the data and identify the initiative’s effect. The study compared roughly 700 full-time employees who participated in the program between 2003 and 2008 alongside employees who did not participate in the same time period.

The intention was to determine learning’s impact on retention. Mutual of Omaha recognized that to attract, retain and motivate the best and the brightest talent, it had to quantify its learning investment.