Communication Skills Are the Easiest Line Item to Defer, and Can Be the Costliest
As L&D professionals plan strategies and budgets for 2027, the challenge is familiar. Competing priorities, limited resources, and increasing pressure to demonstrate a measurable return on every dollar invested in employee development make this challenge familiar.
AI capability, digital transformation, and compliance training will likely feature prominently in next year’s plans. And understandably so. But in the scramble to keep pace with technological change and evolving business requirements, one of the most fundamental workplace capabilities risks being pushed further down the priority list: communication.
Communication and presentation skills training can be difficult to justify when budgets are tight. Unlike technical training, where success might be measured through certification or proficiency with a particular system, improvements in how people communicate, influence and engage others can seem harder to quantify.
But that doesn’t make them any less valuable. In fact, as organisations invest more heavily in technology, the human skills needed to turn those investments into business results become more important than ever.
Consider what happens when a new business strategy isn’t communicated clearly, or a manager struggles to bring their team on board with change, or a promising idea fails to gain support because it wasn’t presented persuasively. We see these issues daily when we support our clients. Importantly, the consequences aren’t simply developmental. They affect productivity, employee engagement, client relationships and ultimately, commercial performance.
And unlike many other capability gaps, poor communication is often highly visible. Clients experience it. Employees feel its effects. Senior leaders see it in meetings, briefings and presentations.
The challenge for L&D professionals is to give communication skills training the attention it deserves within an already crowded development agenda, while demonstrating the value it brings to organisational performance.
The good news is that building communication capability doesn’t necessarily mean committing to expensive, organisation-wide training programmes. It means understanding the gaps, identifying the business outcomes better communication could deliver, and investing in targeted development that drives measurable improvement.
In this blog, we’ll explore how to assess your organisation’s communication capabilities, prioritise development across different employee levels, build a convincing business case for investment and ensure the benefits extend well beyond a single training workshop.
Start With an Honest Picture of Current Capability
Before deciding where to invest in communication training, it’s worth identifying where the biggest development needs lie.
Training requests often arise after a disappointing client pitch, an uncomfortable board presentation, or feedback about a particular manager’s communication style. While these incidents can highlight genuine problems, they don’t necessarily reveal the bigger picture.
A more structured assessment of communication capability can help L&D teams identify where development will make the greatest difference and avoid spending valuable budget on unnecessary training.
So how do you build communication skills into an L&D strategy in a way that’s targeted, relevant and measurable? Start by understanding what people already do well, where they struggle, and which communication challenges most impact business performance.
That doesn’t have to mean introducing a lengthy assessment process (though you might find our simple Six Point Presenter Assessment Checklist helpful). There are several useful sources of information that may already be available within your organisation:
- Manager observations: Where do team members struggle to explain ideas, influence decisions or communicate confidently?
- Employee self-assessments: Which communication situations do people find most challenging, and where would they welcome support?
- Client and stakeholder feedback: Are there recurring concerns about the clarity, credibility, responsiveness or the quality of your presentations?
- Pitch win/loss reviews: Are promising proposals failing to gain traction because the value isn’t being communicated persuasively?
- Real-world observation: What happens when employees present to senior leaders, lead meetings or deliver important briefings?
Importantly, communication capability isn’t necessarily consistent across different situations. Someone who confidently leads an internal team meeting may struggle to present a business case to the board. Similarly, an experienced technical specialist may explain complex information well to colleagues but struggle to engage a non-technical audience.
That’s why it’s useful to assess communication skills in the context of the situations employees actually face, rather than relying solely on generic competency scores.
And look for patterns, not just individual weaknesses. If several people within a department struggle to structure persuasive arguments or communicate key messages clearly, that suggests a broader development opportunity rather than an isolated performance issue.
This approach offers another important benefit. The same assessment that helps you identify where to invest also gives you a baseline to measure improvement against. When you review the effectiveness of your 2027 L&D strategy, you’ll have something more meaningful to demonstrate than workshop attendance figures or participant satisfaction scores.
A practical starting point
Before finalising your 2027 training priorities, ask five managers across different functions a simple question:
Think about the last important presentation, pitch or meeting in your team that didn’t achieve its intended outcome. What went wrong, and what could have been done differently?
Compare their answers. You may discover recurring problems with message clarity, audience engagement, confidence, or handling challenging questions.
Those patterns can help you identify where further assessment is warranted and where targeted training could make a measurable difference.
Don’t start with the training programme. Start with the performance gap.
Connect Communication Objectives to Business Outcomes
Once you’ve identified where communication capability could be strengthened, connect those development needs to the outcomes that matter most to the organisation.
This is where the business case for communication training becomes considerably more compelling.
While improving presentation skills, building confidence, or developing stronger communicators are all worthwhile objectives, they don’t necessarily resonate with senior decision-makers reviewing L&D budgets.
They’re more likely to respond to how those improvements could contribute to business performance.
For example, stronger communication skills can support:
- Higher pitch and tender win rates: Helping sales and business development teams present more persuasive proposals and respond confidently to client questions.
- Shorter sales cycles: Helping teams communicate value clearly, address objections, and support customers in making decisions.
- Stronger leadership pipelines: Preparing emerging leaders to influence stakeholders, present strategic recommendations and communicate with authority.
- More successful organisational change: Equipping managers to explain new initiatives, address concerns and bring employees on board.
- Better collaboration across hybrid teams: Improving the clarity of meetings, briefings and cross-functional communication to reduce misunderstandings and keep projects moving.
The key distinction is between describing the training you intend to deliver and defining what you want it to achieve.
Consider the difference between these two objectives:
Activity-focused objective: Deliver four presentation skills workshops for the sales team.
Outcome-focused objective: Improve the sales team’s ability to communicate value and handle objections in shortlisted pitches, contributing to a higher tender win rate.
Both describe legitimate development priorities, but the second links the investment more clearly to the intended business benefit.
A useful approach is to define three things for each communication objective: who needs to develop, in which situations, and what improvement you’re looking to achieve.
This also makes the training itself more relevant. A programme designed to help sales teams win competitive pitches will look very different from one that prepares senior managers to deliver board presentations or equips team leaders to communicate organisational change.
When development is built around real workplace challenges, participants can practise skills they’ll actually use, and managers have clearer opportunities to observe whether those skills are being applied.
Of course, not every communication improvement will translate neatly into a financial metric. Greater confidence, stronger employee engagement and more effective collaboration can all deliver significant value, even when their commercial impact is less direct.
The key is to identify credible indicators of progress that reflect the original development objective, rather than relying solely on the number of workshops delivered or employees trained.
That way, when it’s time to review your 2027 L&D investment, you’ll be able to show not just what training took place, but what changed as a result.
Don’t just measure the training you deliver. Measure the difference it makes.
Match Communication Training to Different Development Needs
One of the most effective ways to make an L&D budget work harder is to ensure employees receive communication training relevant to their roles, responsibilities, and career stage.
After all, while the principles of effective communication remain largely consistent, the situations in which people need to apply them can vary widely.
A graduate preparing to deliver their first team presentation faces different challenges from a divisional leader presenting a strategic recommendation to the Senior Leadership Team. Similarly, a sales professional pitching for a major contract needs a different emphasis from a manager leading their team through organisational change.
That’s why a more targeted approach to communication development can deliver better results than relying exclusively on a single, standardised programme.
For L&D teams planning their 2027 investment, grouping employees by the communication challenges they face can help.
Four Levels of Communication Development
- Graduates and early-career professionals: Build confidence, structure ideas logically, deliver clear messages, and develop the foundations of effective presentation skills.
- Managers and team leaders: Lead productive meetings and briefings, influence colleagues, communicate change, and present confidently to senior stakeholders.
- Senior leaders and executives: Developing executive presence and gravitas, communicating strategy persuasively, handling challenging questions and inspiring confidence during high-stakes presentations.
- Sales, bid and client-facing teams: Creating compelling pitches, tailoring messages to different decision-makers, communicating commercial value and responding effectively to objections.
These aren’t necessarily rigid categories. An experienced senior leader might benefit from revisiting presentation fundamentals, while an early-career employee working in business development may need specialist pitching skills.
The objective is to match development to genuine communication needs, rather than assuming that job title or seniority alone determines the appropriate training.
This approach also offers a practical budgeting advantage.
Instead of committing the entire communication development budget to a single organisation-wide rollout, L&D teams can phase training throughout the year, prioritising the groups where improved communication is likely to have the greatest immediate impact.
For example, an organisation preparing for a major sales initiative might prioritise its bid team in the first quarter, followed by management development ahead of a planned organisational change. The organisation could then incorporate foundational training for graduates and emerging talent into existing development programmes.
This doesn’t mean abandoning the benefits of a consistent approach. In fact, shared communication frameworks and principles across programmes can create a common language throughout the organisation while allowing the content, exercises, and coaching to reflect each group’s specific challenges.
The result is a more flexible, relevant and potentially cost-effective approach to communication development, with investment directed where it can make the greatest difference.
Keep the principles consistent. Make the development personal.
Build the Business Case Before Budget Conversations Start
Even when the value of effective communication is widely recognised, securing investment in its development can be challenging.
One reason is that the benefits aren’t always as immediately visible or as straightforward to measure as those of technical training. It’s relatively easy to demonstrate how many employees have achieved a particular certification or learned to use a new system. Showing how improved communication has influenced business performance requires a little more thought.
But difficult to measure doesn’t mean impossible to measure. And it certainly doesn’t mean the investment lacks commercial value.
For L&D professionals preparing their 2027 budgets, the strongest business cases will connect communication development to specific organisational priorities, supported by credible evidence of both the potential benefits and the costs of leaving capability gaps unaddressed.
Consider the Cost of Ineffective Communication
Sometimes, the most persuasive way to demonstrate the value of training is to examine what happens when communication falls short.
Consider a few scenarios:
- A major tender is lost. The proposal is commercially competitive, but the team struggles to communicate its value convincingly or respond to challenging questions.
- An organisational change programme stalls. The strategy is sound, but managers struggle to explain its purpose, address employee concerns or build support for its implementation.
- A leadership position is filled externally. Internal candidates are technically capable, but some lack the communication and influencing skills needed to step confidently into more senior roles.
- Meetings consume valuable working hours without producing decisions. Poor structure, unclear messaging, and ineffective facilitation mean discussions repeat themselves, and progress stalls.
Of course, communication is rarely the only factor influencing these outcomes. Tenders can be lost on price, change programmes can falter because of operational challenges, and external recruitment decisions may reflect a range of organisational needs.
The important question is whether stronger communication capability could have improved the outcome, and what evidence supports that assessment.
Make Measurement Part of the Proposal
A convincing business case should also explain how you will evaluate the effectiveness of the training.
Depending on the development objective, useful indicators might include pitch conversion rates, internal promotion readiness, time spent in meetings, stakeholder feedback or improvements in presentation performance measured against the original capability assessment.
Not all of these measures will demonstrate a direct financial return, and that’s fine. What matters is establishing a credible connection between the training, the behaviours you want to change, and the business outcomes those behaviours support.
It’s also worth identifying when you’ll review progress. For example, participants might be reassessed three months after training, with managers providing feedback on whether they’re applying new skills in real workplace situations. Commercial indicators can then be reviewed over a longer period, where appropriate.
This gives budget decision-makers greater confidence that they will evaluate the investment against meaningful outcomes, rather than simply judging it by attendance figures or positive workshop feedback.
Demonstrate Value in the Training Solution
The business case can be strengthened further by showing how the proposed training investment has been evaluated.
For example, does the provider tailor its programmes to the organisation’s actual communication challenges? Can participants practise using real presentations, pitches and business scenarios? Is there a clear approach to assessment, feedback and reinforcing skills after the training?
These considerations help demonstrate that the proposed investment is designed to deliver practical, lasting improvements rather than simply provide a positive learning experience on the day.
A Practical Starting Point
Identify one recent business situation where communication may have contributed to a disappointing outcome.
It could be an unsuccessful pitch, a delayed decision or a project that struggled to gain stakeholder support.
Work with the relevant business team to establish what happened, the potential commercial cost, and whether communication contributed.
For example, if a business lost a tender worth $500,000, it would be misleading to claim that poor presentation skills cost the organisation $500,000. But if the client feedback specifically identified a failure to communicate value or respond convincingly to questions, that’s meaningful evidence of a development need.
A concrete, well-evidenced example can make a far more persuasive case for targeted training than a general argument about the importance of soft skills.
By preparing that evidence early in the planning process, L&D teams can approach budget discussions with a clearer rationale for investment and a credible plan to evaluate its impact.
A stronger business case doesn’t just explain what training will cost. It shows what better communication is worth.
Plan for Reinforcement, Not Just the Workshop
Even the most effective communication training programme can only achieve so much in a single session.
Participants may leave feeling more confident, equipped with new techniques and enthusiastic about putting them into practice. But once they’re back at work, competing priorities take over, familiar routines return, and opportunities to practise can easily slip down the agenda.
That’s why reinforcement deserves a place in the L&D plan from the start, rather than something to consider only after the initial training ends.
The good news is that reinforcing communication skills doesn’t necessarily require additional workshops or significant extra expenditure. Often, the best opportunities to embed learning already exist in the workday.
Make Practice Part of Everyday Work
There are several practical ways to help employees apply and strengthen their new communication skills:
- Follow-up coaching: Short, targeted sessions can help participants work through specific challenges, refine techniques and build confidence as they apply their learning.
- Manager-led practice: Regular team meetings, project updates and internal briefings provide opportunities to practise structuring messages, engaging audiences and presenting with greater impact.
- Shared frameworks and language: Giving teams a consistent approach to preparing and delivering presentations makes it easier to provide constructive feedback and reinforce good habits.
- Timely refreshers: Scheduling short sessions ahead of major pitches, board presentations, or important organisational announcements helps employees revisit techniques when they’re most relevant.
- Peer feedback: Encouraging colleagues to observe presentations and share constructive feedback creates opportunities for continuous improvement without requiring formal training sessions.
The aim isn’t to add more work to already busy schedules. It’s to make communication skills development part of how people work.
Give Managers a Role in Making Learning Stick
Managers play a particularly important role in whether new communication behaviours stick.
When a manager understands the techniques their team has been taught, they can reinforce them through everyday coaching, feedback and encouragement. They can also create opportunities for employees to practise new skills in low-stakes situations.
For example, a manager might encourage a team member to lead part of a regular briefing, help them prepare for an important stakeholder presentation or provide feedback on how clearly they communicated their key message.
These small interventions can make a significant difference over time.
This is also where a consistent approach to communication development across different employee levels becomes valuable. When managers and their teams share common frameworks and terminology, reinforcing new skills becomes easier and more natural.
Protect Some of the Budget for Follow-Up
When planning communication development for 2027, consider the full learning journey rather than allocating the entire budget to initial programme delivery.
That might mean choosing a smaller, more targeted programme with coaching and reinforcement opportunities, rather than a broader rollout with limited follow-up. And building reassessment into the plan provides another important benefit.
Reviewing participants’ communication capability after six or twelve months, using the same criteria established at the outset, can help demonstrate whether improvements have been sustained and where further development might be valuable.
Combined with manager observations and relevant business performance indicators, this creates a more complete picture of the return on training investment.
It also gives L&D teams valuable evidence to inform their next planning cycle, making future budget conversations more productive.
Ultimately, the value of communication training isn’t determined by how much participants learn on the day. It’s determined by how effectively they apply those skills in the weeks and months that follow.
The workshop builds the skills. What happens afterwards builds the value.
A Communication Plan, Not a Training Line Item
As L&D teams finalise their 2027 priorities, the challenge isn’t simply finding room in the budget for communication training. It’s about ensuring that investment is targeted, relevant, and delivers lasting value.
As we’ve explored, a strategic approach to communication development starts well before anyone enters a training room.
- Assess current capability: Identify where communication gaps are affecting performance and where development could make the greatest difference.
- Connect skills to business outcomes: Define what improved communication should achieve and how you’ll measure progress.
- Target development effectively: Match training to the needs of different teams, roles and levels of responsibility.
- Build a credible business case: Demonstrate the potential value of better communication, supported by meaningful evidence.
- Reinforce the learning: Create opportunities for employees to practise, apply and strengthen their skills long after the workshop ends.
None of this necessarily requires a larger training budget. Targeted training isn’t about spending more. It’s about getting more value from the budget available.
And that value can extend well beyond individual performance. Employees who communicate clearly and persuasively can help organisations make better decisions, collaborate more effectively, implement change successfully and develop stronger leaders from within.
By building communication capability deliberately into the 2027 L&D strategy, organisations can address development needs proactively rather than waiting for problems to emerge.
The real return on communication training isn’t measured by attendance. It’s measured by what they do differently afterwards.
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How SecondNature Can Help
At SecondNature, we understand that lasting behavioural change takes more than a successful workshop. That’s why our tailored communication and presentation skills programmes include complimentary post-training coaching support, access to our online Performance Support Centre, and a structured series of follow-up emails designed to remind, refresh, and reinforce learning.
It’s all part of our commitment to helping organisations build sustainable communication capability and maximise the value of their training investment.
If you’re considering where external presentation coaching could strengthen your 2027 L&D strategy, why not speak with one of our senior coaches? We can help you identify where specialist support will add the most value and develop a tailored program that reinforces your corporate strategy and goals, while complementing what you’re already doing internally.
At SecondNature Australia, we specialise in tailored programs that help professionals at all levels become engaging, compelling, authentic communicators, whether they’re pitching to clients, presenting to stakeholders, leading hybrid teams, or just starting out in their careers. Our tailored training programs are practical, proven, and designed to suit your people, your industry, and your specific goals.
So, if you need to compare presentation skills training providers, get in touch. Our team can walk you through program options, customisation pathways and real case results from Australian organisations.
For nearly 20 years, we’ve been known as Australia’s Business Presentation Skills Training Experts, transforming the communication and presentation success of thousands of people in an A-Z of global and local organisations – check out what they say about our programs.
