Hi Lynne

In the absence of more details let me make the following suggestions, based on the stated assumptions:

Assumption #1: Central Piedmont Community College sells training courses to a variety of clients - individuals and local organisations.

You are wanting to know in advance if suggested programmes, be they already in existance, or simply tabled for future development and offering, will provide a positive return on investment to the College over the first 3 years.

You may find it easier to identify the costs of development and delivery over a certain period of time, e.g. 3 years, but there are some variables. For example, different courses may have different payback numbers, e.g. course #1 has a break even of 6 meaning you need to run it 6 times over the 3 years (accounting for inflation and other factors and assuming a certain revenue per course) in order to cover its development and delivery costs (including your salary for example).

What you are possibly having difficulties with is a decent forecast of how many sessions will run, and with what takeup and income?

This problem is no different to that faced by any organisation looking to develop and sell any product or service - what's the breakeven point, and what are the factors involved. The typical approach then is to engage in some formal market research - what do people/organisations want, what would these products/services need to look like, what sort of price expectation do possible customers have, what lifetime the product/service can expect (including growth/decline curves) etc etc.

It is not necessary to have any financial acumen to work through the steps necessary to determine payback, to answer the core question of "will this pay for itself and then some within 3 years?"

My understanding of the Kirkpatrick/Phillips approaches and even those of most of the others, is that the training needs to take place first before being able to get credible, actual data to confirm or refute any forecasts, and your issue is that you need a credible forecast before committing resource to development and sales activities - is this right?

I suspect that you are going to have to do some market research along the lines indicated above in order to get a credible and reasonably robust sense of what the market wants and what it will pay for and what the uptake will be.

I'd be happy to think on this more if you could confirm any of the above assumptions and clarify/expand on the details provided.

Kind regards

Martin Schmalenbach