From your experience, what are some smart ideas to pursue the top management to increase training budget?

1. Connect the training with the performance

2. Validate policies and standards with training and certified employees

Thank You

There are many ways a training manager can persuade the top management to increase the training budget. Some of those ideas might not be traditional ones, but they work:

1. I do the opposite with the top management: I ask them to decrease the training budget for the coming period by 20%  to save money for the company. Still, I say I don't want the employees' performance to be affected so we'll utilize the internal trainers (if you have full time internal trainers). This will establish trust and credibility with upper management. As a training manager, I choose where those 20% cut will take place, mostly extra stuff that I can do without (like paid subscriptions to training journals / associations...etc - cutting on new training kits or games which I planned to purchase - cut on retreats / changing the venues for training to less costly ones...etc). I get to choose where those cuts can take place and I make sure they don't affect the main stream training schedule that I have in mind. 

2. Another idea is to ask training vendors (if you deal with them) to provide more testers / unpaid short training sessions as a follow up service for the paid ones they get to deliver to your organization. Also, ask them to do follow up coaching sessions for participants. In today's economic turn-down, many training providers will agree to such requests in order to get more business from their clients. You need to highlight this to your top management and show them how you are getting more value for the same amount of budget.