Calculate your Workforce Development ROI with the Forrester TEI Calculator

You know skills-based talent practices matter. You know your workforce needs to move faster. But when it's time to ask for investment, it always comes back to one question: What's the ROI?

Fair question. And once you can answer it, you can start thinking bigger. What would it mean if you could cut hiring time in half? Or shrink onboarding from five days to two? Or promote from within for 70% of management roles?

That's why we commissioned Forrester Research to build a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Calculator for Cornerstone Galaxy. It's a simple way to model the potential business impact of workforce agility, grounded in independent research.

In the study commissioned by Cornerstone, Forrester spoke with five organizations using Cornerstone Galaxy to uncover some compelling results. Using the same model, they built a calculator that you can use to explore what these results might look like in your company.

Why this matters now

The gap between how fast business needs to change and how quickly people can adapt continues to widen. Organizations are facing skills shortages, rapid technological shifts, and growing expectations for development and career growth.

The old approach, fragmented systems, spreadsheet-based skills tracking, and reactive training programs, isn't keeping up. And unlike many strategic investments, workforce development can deliver both immediate financial returns and long-term capability building.

Leading organizations are shifting toward skills-based talent practices because the old way just doesn't cut it anymore. Legacy systems for managing skills and learning weren't built for a world where people are constantly upskilling, or for leaders who need visibility into what skills they have today and what they'll need tomorrow. Most leaders intuitively understand why workforce agility matters. The challenge is translating that intuition into numbers that hold up in budget discussions and investment reviews.

That's where the calculator comes in.

What is the Workforce Development ROI Calculator and how does it work?

The Forrester TEI Calculator commissioned by Cornerstone is an interactive model that helps you estimate the financial impact of workforce agility across your organization.

Instead of relying on high-level benchmarks or generic claims, the calculator allows you to input your own variables to model how improvements across the employee lifecycle translate into measurable business outcomes. You can adjust inputs based on your organization's current state, including:

• workforce size,

• hiring speed,

• onboarding timelines,

• internal mobility rates,

• and learning and compliance costs

The result is a clearer view of:

• Return on investment (ROI)

• Net present value (NPV)

• Payback period

• Cost savings and productivity gains

You get workforce development as a business case you can actually defend in a budget meeting.

To ensure the calculator reflects real-world outcomes, Cornerstone worked with Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on Cornerstone Galaxy.

Forrester interviewed five organizations across multiple industries, including manufacturing, logistics, media, airlines, and legal, that were using Cornerstone Galaxy.

They then combined their experiences into a composite organization: a hypothetical manufacturing company with 5,500 employees and more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Using Forrester's TEI methodology, they modeled the three-year, risk-adjusted financial impact of deploying Cornerstone Galaxy across the organization. The findings from that study form the foundation of the calculator's assumptions.

The headline numbers

Over three years, Forrester found that the composite organization achieved:

• Value of an upskilled employee base worth $6.2 million

• Savings from reduced time to hire - $8.6M

• Reduced employee time to productivity - $2.4M

• Content consolidation savings - $1.9M

Even with conservative assumptions and risk adjustments applied, the modeled benefits significantly outweighed the costs and did so quickly.

Where the value actually come from

The ROI didn't come from one dramatic transformation. It came from a series of improvements across the employee lifecycle, the same areas the Workforce Development ROI Calculator is designed to model.

• Faster hiring: Time to hire dropped 49%, from 87 days to 43. That efficiency translated into $9.1 million in HR productivity savings over three years, freeing HR teams to focus on strategic work instead of manual recruitment coordination.

• Stronger internal mobility and upskilling: Better visibility into skills made it easier to promote from within and reduce external recruiting costs. The composite organization filled 70% of management roles internally and cut external recruitment by 10% annually, worth $6.3 million over three years when replacing 1,650 employees per year.

• Quicker onboarding and time to productivity: Streamlined onboarding reduced in-person training time from five days to two, a 40% improvement. Employees became productive faster while travel expenses dropped, contributing $1.6 million in savings.

• Content and platform consolidation: Moving from 15 different learning platforms down to one, discontinuing unnecessary third-party subscriptions, and eliminating duplicated content saved $2.1 million.

• Reduced compliancerisk: Improved training delivery and automated tracking helped lower compliance and safety risks. For regulated industries, this goes beyond avoiding fines; it helps prevent workplace injuries, safety incidents, and reputational damage. This contributed $7.4 million over three years.

Altogether, the modeled benefits totaled $26.54 million against $4.89 million in costs.

Benefits beyond the financial metrics

The calculator focuses on quantifiable financial outcomes because that's what budget conversations require. But the organizations Forrester interviewed also reported gains that matter just as much, even if they're harder to put on a spreadsheet.

• Employee engagement increased to 56% at one organization, compared to a 20% benchmark.

• Voluntary turnover dropped by 15% as employees saw clearer career pathways.

• Internal promotions increased significantly, especially for hourly workers moving into management.

• And managers gained tools to support more meaningful development conversations instead of relying on gut instinct and annual reviews.

As one head of talent acquisition shared:

"We're building our talent pools. We want 95% of our people recruited from within. Sometimes I hear, 'No, you need fresh blood.' But my response is: 'No, you don't. You need to focus on developing the people you've got because it's the best talent you'll find.'"

These aren't just nice-to-have. They're the conditions that make the financial returns sustainable over time.

What factors affect your actual ROI results?

The 443% ROI modeled by Forrester is based on a composite organization using risk-adjusted assumptions. Actual results will vary based on adoption, existing systems, and operational complexity.

Whether you're a 500-person logistics company or a 10,000-employee healthcare system, the variables that drive ROI will look different. The calculator allows you to adjust assumptions based on your workforce and operations, focus on the value drivers most relevant to your organization, and see how changes in hiring speed, onboarding, or internal mobility affect ROI.

By inputting your own data, the calculator generates customized projections for ROI, NPV, and payback period using the same research-backed methodology. You don't need to be a $1 billion manufacturer to see meaningful returns; you just need to understand which levers matter most in your context.

But if you're trying to answer whether a workforce development platform is worth investing in, the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) of Cornerstone provides a credible, data-driven place to start. Because decisions about your workforce deserve better than guesswork.