How to Calculate Your ROI

Measure Your Costs

To calculate your ROI, you’ll need to take inventory of the different types of expenses associated with your WIL program(s). Not all WIL programs cost the same. For example, emerging WIL types (micro-placements, online projects, or consulting work, etc.) are low cost and lower risk compared to more traditional placement-based WIL, such as apprenticeships, internships, and co-ops. Below is a list of the main costs to consider in order to calculate your ROI. The full list of costs can be found in the How to Calculate Your ROI: A Step by Step Guide found above.

Recruitment and Administrative Staff Costs

Recruitment and administrative costs can include the wage costs of staff completing administrative tasks or any other costs associated with the recruitment process (advertising, job posting fees, etc.).

Example: 
One of your employees is spending 10 hours per week over 6 weeks recruiting WIL students, at an hourly rate of $40/hr. They also incurred paid advertising costs of $1,500 for the duration of the recruitment cycle. Your total recruitment and administrative costs are $3,900 ([$40/hr x 10 hr/wk x 6 wks] + $1,500).

Training Staff Wages

This includes the cost of any internal or external staff to supervise and/or train your WIL students for the duration of your WIL program. These hours are considered a cost since they are not being used for the employees' normal activities.

Example: 
Two of your supervisors spend 20 hours per week supervising and instructing WIL students during their 12 week placement, at an hourly rate of $30/h. Your total training staffing cost is $14,400 (2 x [$30/hr x 20 hrs/wk x 12 wks]).

Student Wages

Student wages include all regular wages, overtime, or other additional financial compensation for  food, travel, living expenses, etc. 

Example: 
If your organization hired 10 WIL students for 35 hours per week at an hourly rate of $15/h for a total of 12 weeks, your total cost is $63,000 (10x [$15/hr x 35 hrs/wk x 12 wks]).

Training Supplies

Training supplies can include books, learning software, videos, equipment, or other educational fees or external courses offered as part of the student’s WIL experience.

Example: 
One of your WIL students has been approved to complete a specialized Accessibility training course to design accessible documents for your organization. The cost of the training course is $450.

Material and Infrastructure Costs

Essential equipment and software required by WIL students is also a potential WIL cost.  Especially during virtual placements students may need a laptop, monitor, keyboard, etc., depending on the nature of their work. Infrastructure costs relate to any machinery or appliances required for students to complete their work, as well as the cost of the premises and other infrastructure used by WIL students.

Example: 
You hired 10 new WIL students, all of whom require laptops for the duration of their placement, costing $1,000 each. Five of those students also need computing software installed, costing $500/installation. Finally, your organization is renting out a space in order to conduct a 1 day orientation for all of the students, costing a total of $8,000. Your total material and infrastructure cost would be $20,500 ([ [10 x $1,000] + [5 x $500] ]+ $8,000).

Other Costs

Other costs to consider can include, but are not limited to, insurance costs, taxes, and opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are the value of the production that will be foregone as staff and other resources are used for the WIL program rather than other productive tasks. Read more about each type of costs in the full guide.

Don’t forget to access regional, provincial, national, and sector-specific financial support programs to help offset your costs. Be sure to check out our Financial Supports Catalogue to find which financial supports are available to you.

Identify Your Benefits

WIL programs provide many long and short term benefits. Below are some of the key benefits your organization could gain through a WIL program. To learn more about each of the benefits described below, be sure to check out our ROI: Beyond the Numbers Guide.

Skilled Talent Pipeline

Access to a skilled talent pipeline can look different depending on your organization and sector. Here are some examples of benefits you could gain by building a skilled talent pipeline through WIL. For the full list of benefits, download the guide.

• Increasing awareness and appeal of your organization/industry/sector among students.
• Assessing potential future employees and retaining post-secondary students after their placement.
• Developing a talent pool of candidates with specific skills.

Productivity

WIL students improve the productivity of your organization when they produce or contribute to specific outputs or deliverables during their placement. When creating a WIL placement ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the role of the WIL student at your organization? For example, are they completing a project, alleviating the workload of other staff, filling short-term vacancies?
• What concrete tasks will be done by the students in your WIL program? 

Innovation

WIL students can bring new ideas, creative insights, and help your organization identify new ways to share knowledge, all while also creating a collaborative work environment.

Other Benefits

Consider what other benefits, beyond those listed above, your organization will gain from participating in a WIL program. These could include having a positive impact on your team, work culture, advancing specific projects, etc. For example, an important benefit of WIL is the creation of more diverse and inclusive workplaces. A WIL program is a pathway to: 

• Addressing labour gaps through the recruitment of historically underrepresented groups.
• Attracting new talent through international student recruitment.
• Confronting systemic barriers, and cultivating inclusivity, belonging, and accessibility at your organization.

Quantify Your Benefits

The benefits outlined in the previous step can be difficult to quantify. But assigning, or at least estimating, dollar amounts to these outcomes is necessary to measure and track the financial ROI of your WIL program. For each of the benefits listed, your organization will need to determine a representative indicator used to measure its impact. Indicators need to be relevant, understandable, unbiased, and easy to measure. Some benefits will have straightforward indicators, such as sales and increases in production or retention rates. Others may be more challenging to calculate. 

Skilled Talent Pipeline Benefits

There are several ways to ascribe monetary value to increased access to a skilled talent pipeline for your organization. One common metric is the WIL retention rate at your organization, i.e. the number of students you hire once they have finished their diploma or degree. Studies show that students joining organizations who have already spent time there have stronger technical and social-emotional skills than new hires without workplace experience. They also have a built-in sense of belonging at the organization and are easier and less expensive to onboard.

Example:
Your organization has determined that it saves $1,000 for each WIL student it hires versus hiring someone external. This value was calculated as the difference between the cost to attract, interview, onboard, and train external applicants compared to your WIL students. You’ve hired 6 students out of the 12 that interned at your organization and you therefore saved $6,000. 

Productivity Benefits

Productivity indicators can look different depending on the industry (note: tracking sales is a common example but not universally applicable). In many cases, your WIL students are completing projects for your organization, whose monetary value can be quantified. Other indicators can be focused on the efficiency of tasks or alleviation of work from full-time employees. Rather than having to hire a contract employee, WIL students can be hired during peak seasons. Your organization can, in turn, profit from their professional development, especially if they are hired post-graduation.

Examples:
1.   A WIL student takes on some of the lower intensity tasks of a more senior employee, allowing the senior employee to dedicate their time to higher value or more productive tasks. 
2.  You increase your productivity by having a WIL student complete work that would have been outsourced to an external vendor at a higher cost. 

Note: These calculations are overly simplified but give you a sense of how to calculate productivity benefits.

Innovation and EDI Benefits

Assigning monetary value to intangible benefits received from your WIL program, such as innovation or diversity and inclusion, can be challenging. But with some practice you can develop indicators to estimate how many new ideas, perspectives, and recommendations suggested by WIL students made a significant difference at your organization. Did they suggest a new way of processing orders, saving the organization time and money? Did they identify a new software tool that automates repetitive tasks and allows staff to spend time on more important tasks?

Measure ROI & Incorporate SROI

After identifying your costs and benefits in steps 2 to 4, you are now ready to enter your data and calculate the ROI of your WIL program(s). Be sure to use BHER’s ROI Interactive Calculator below to help put all this data together. And don’t forget to input your financial supports! BHER has developed a Financial Supports Catalogue for you to browse and apply to financial support programs to help develop your WIL programs. Check it out below.

You might have also heard of an alternative cost-benefit analysis similar to ROI: the social return on investment (SROI). While ROI focuses on quantitative monetary value, SROI emphasizes the social value of the program. In step 2, you may have considered some of the social benefits that are particularly hard to quantify. Taking an SROI approach when reporting those benefits can allow you to measure and track the progress of your social impact without having to reduce it to a number. 

An example of a SROI measurement can relate to equity, diversity, and inclusion in your workplace. The number of employees on staff that identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or a person of colour prior to your WIL program compared to after your program is inherently a quantitative indicator. A qualitative indicator, on the other hand, would include the degree to which students from equity-deserving communities feel like they are able to make meaningful, valued contributions to their teams or projects, as reported in peer, supervisor, or anonymous evaluations. Other SROI components can include factors such as innovation or corporate social responsibility.

To create an SROI framework, you’ll need to:

• Talk with stakeholders within and outside your organization to identify what broader social benefits are created from your WIL programs.

• Understand how those social benefits are created through the WIL activities and outcomes.

• Create appropriate indicators to track the changes and progress of your social benefits.

• Allocate financial proxies on those indicators that do not lend themselves to monetization.

• Compare the value of social benefits to the financial cost of your WIL program.

To learn more about the benefits, social impacts, and other factors of ROI in WIL that go beyond the numbers, download our ROI: Beyond the Numbers Guide.