ABB ACS380 drives built in Mexico to IEC standards, arrived at a US site for a material handling application. The drives are capable. The certification gap is what has to be resolved before they energize.
Every maintenance manager already knows that training has value. The challenge is never convincing yourself. The challenge is putting numbers in front of leadership that justify the cost at budget time.
A training course costs money. Sending technicians to training means they are not in the plant that day. The travel, the lodging, the course fee, the productivity gap, these all show up on the expense side of the ledger immediately. The return side is harder to quantify, which is why training investments so often lose out to capital projects and equipment purchases that come with clean payback calculations.
This article gives you the data and the framework to make the case. It is written so you can read it, pull what you need, and either use the structure directly in a proposal to leadership or forward it to someone who is asking why this line item belongs in next year’s budget.
The Cost of Not Training
Start with the problem, not the solution. What does it actually cost when your team does not understand VFDs at a working level?
Consider a common scenario. A technician who does not understand the difference between an overcurrent fault and an overload fault treats both the same way: press reset, press start, hope. The fault recurs because the underlying cause (a mechanical binding, an undersized drive, a wrong parameter setting) was never addressed. Maintenance gets called again. The drive eventually gets replaced under warranty even though it was never defective, because nobody diagnosed the actual root cause. The replacement drive fails the same way, because the installation error or configuration problem was never corrected.
That cycle is invisible in any single work order. Each individual event looks like normal maintenance noise. In aggregate, across dozens of drives and hundreds of work orders over a year, it represents real money, typically tens of thousands of dollars per year at a plant with any meaningful VFD population.
Industry data consistently shows that more than 80% of early VFD failures trace to installation, commissioning, and configuration errors rather than hardware defects. Those errors are all preventable. They are also all invisible to a technician who has not been taught what to look for. For the diagnostic framework itself, see our VFD troubleshooting guide.
The Data on Training ROI
Most of the training-ROI numbers in circulation do not survive a look at where they came from, so it is worth separating what holds up from what simply gets repeated.
The figure you see most often is 30 dollars returned for every dollar spent on training. It traces back through a 2008 IBM white paper to a Merrill Lynch study from 2000, reporting one company’s result. The 24 percent profit margin number usually credited to ATD is from HR Magazine in 2001, and it describes companies in the top quarter of training spend rather than companies with good training programs. Neither belongs in a budget request that somebody in finance might check.
Two figures do hold up, with their limits stated.
Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs between one-half and two times that employee’s annual salary, once you account for recruiting, onboarding, the productivity ramp for a new hire, and the institutional knowledge that leaves with them. That is a general workforce number and Gallup does not break it out for skilled trades, so treat it as the order of magnitude rather than a precise figure for a technician.
LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report found that 94 percent of employees said they would stay at a company longer if it invested in helping them learn. That is stated intent rather than measured behavior, and LinkedIn’s 2025 edition no longer carries the measure, so it is directional at best.
My own data is narrower and closer to your plant. The 2024 U.S. Industrial Maintenance Worker Study collected 431 valid responses from industrial maintenance workers, cross-validated against a 4,270-sample dataset. Its strongest result is the relationship between effort and job satisfaction, r = 0.370 at p < 0.001. The study did not test training as an intervention, so I will not claim it proves that training reduces turnover. What it does establish is that discretionary effort and satisfaction move together, and discretionary effort is the first thing a plant loses when technicians are asked to work on equipment nobody taught them.
Training is a productivity investment and a retention investment at the same time. Untrained people leave and take institutional knowledge with them, which leaves the plant paying twice: once for the turnover, and again for the reactive maintenance that fills the months while a replacement comes up to speed.
Translating the Data to Your Plant
The research makes a general case. Leadership usually wants to see the math applied to your specific operation. Here is a simple framework that takes a maintenance manager about an hour to run.
First, pull the VFD-related work orders from the past 12 months. Count them. Then go back through and flag how many of those were repeat visits for the same fault on the same drive within a short window (say, 90 days). Those repeats are your indicator of misdiagnosis or incomplete root-cause analysis.
Second, estimate the labor cost of those repeat visits. Multiply the technician hours by your loaded labor rate. Do not use the raw hourly wage. Use the fully burdened rate that includes benefits, overhead, and supervision, because that is what the work order actually costs the plant.
Third, add the cost of any drives that were replaced when the root cause was really an installation or configuration problem. Drives pulled under warranty are not free to the plant even though they are free from the manufacturer. There is still labor to remove and reinstall, there is still the downtime during the swap, and there is still the risk that the replacement fails the same way.
Fourth, add the production downtime cost for unplanned VFD-related stops. Most plants have a dollars-per-hour figure for production downtime in their cost accounting. Use it.
That total, labor for repeat visits plus unnecessary drive replacements plus downtime cost, is the annual cost of the knowledge gap at your plant. Compare it to the cost of training your team. For most plants with 20 or more VFDs, the training pays for itself within the first year through reduced repeat failures alone, before any of the other benefits are counted.
What Changes After Training
Vague promises about “improved performance” do not survive a budget review. Here is what actually changes, in terms that map to measurable outcomes.
After structured VFD training, technicians diagnose faults by category (overcurrent vs. overload, overvoltage vs. undervoltage, ground fault vs. communication fault) instead of resetting blindly and hoping. They identify installation root causes, the grounding problems, cable routing errors, and inadequate cooling that drive the 80% figure from earlier, instead of replacing drives that were never defective.
They configure parameters correctly the first time instead of copying settings from the last job that happened to use the same drive model. They establish and use operational baselines so that a “hot” drive can be distinguished from a normally warm one, instead of guessing what normal looks like. They perform the commissioning sequence in the right order, which means commissioning itself takes less time (often significantly less) than before. For the structured commissioning sequence that trained technicians follow, see our VFD Commissioning Guide.
Each of these outcomes is measurable. Each one reduces cost. Together they explain why the research numbers look the way they do.
The Retention Argument
Skilled maintenance technicians are hard to find and expensive to replace. Industrial maintenance labor has been structurally tight for the better part of a decade, and the pipeline of new technicians coming into the trade has not kept pace with the retirement wave leaving it. Most maintenance managers reading this do not need to be told. They are already living it.
Training is one of the retention tools that costs least, and it is one of the few a maintenance manager can authorize without a capital request. When technicians see the company investing in them, they tend to stay. When they feel stagnant, they leave, usually for somebody who will invest in them. The LinkedIn number is stated intent rather than measured behavior, so I would not rest a case on it alone. The replacement cost when somebody does leave is the part nobody disputes.
Losing one experienced VFD technician carries a real, calculable cost: the recruiting expense, the hiring cycle, the onboarding investment, and the 6 to 12 month productivity ramp before the replacement operates at full capacity. That total almost certainly exceeds the cost of training your entire team. For what a VFD training program actually covers and how it is delivered, see the training programs.
Building the Proposal
When you bring this to leadership, keep it tight. The maintenance manager who goes in with a 20-slide deck is usually the one who does not get the approval. The one who goes in with a one-page summary and answers every question calmly usually does.
The one-page proposal has three elements. First, the cost of the current gap, calculated from your own work order data using the framework above. This is the credibility anchor. It shows you are not arguing from theory. Second, the expected return, expressed as reduced repeat failures, faster commissioning, and reduced turnover risk. Use the research numbers as support, not as the main argument. Your own data makes the local case. Third, the training investment itself: course cost, travel, time away from the plant, any supporting materials.
Frame the comparison plainly. What does this cost, and what do we get back? Leadership respects a manager who can answer that question in a page and back it up when asked. If someone requests more detail, you have it, but you do not lead with it.
Closing
The data supports the investment. The math works at nearly every plant with a meaningful VFD population. The research findings are consistent, the logic is durable, and the local numbers almost always cooperate when you actually run them.
The remaining question is whether your plant will train reactively, after enough failures and turnover accumulate to force the conversation, or proactively, before the next round of installations and before the next experienced technician leaves for a competitor that does invest.
The Before the First Fault training course covers the full VFD lifecycle from selection through commissioning through long-term reliability. It is designed for field technicians, plant engineers, electricians, and maintenance professionals who work with drives every day. For the companion reference that supports trained technicians long after the course is over, see Before the First Fault: A Field Guide to VFD Installation and Reliability.
Author: Dr. Carl Lee Tolbert, PhD, CMRP, Wayward Leaders LLC, waywardleaders.com
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the ROI of VFD training?
The widely circulated figure of $30 returned per $1 spent does not hold up once you follow its sourcing, so I do not use it. For VFD training the return comes from three places you can actually measure: reduced repeat failures caused by misdiagnosis, faster commissioning on new installations, and better retention of the technicians who receive the training. Most plants with 20 or more drives see the training pay for itself within the first year on reduced repeat failures alone.
How much does VFD training cost?
VFD training costs vary widely by format. Manufacturer-sponsored online modules often run a few hundred dollars per technician. Structured in-person certificate courses typically fall in the range of $1,000 to $2,000 per seat for multi-day programs. Custom on-site training for an entire maintenance team is usually priced per day plus instructor travel. The right comparison is not the training cost in isolation, but training cost against the cost of the failures and turnover it prevents.
How do I justify maintenance training to management?
Lead with your own data, not industry research. Pull the VFD-related work orders from the past 12 months, flag the repeat visits, estimate the labor cost of those repeats, add the cost of drives replaced without a confirmed defect, and add the production downtime cost for unplanned stops. That total is the cost of the current knowledge gap at your plant. Compare it to the training investment and present both on a single page.
How long does it take for VFD training to pay for itself?
For most plants with 20 or more VFDs, the training pays for itself within the first year through reduced repeat failures alone. Plants with heavier downtime costs or more complex drive applications (water/wastewater, HVAC, food and beverage, process industries) typically see payback faster. The full return, including reduced turnover and faster commissioning, continues to accumulate over multiple years.
What should a VFD training program cover?
A complete program covers the full lifecycle: drive sizing for the actual application, motor selection, cable and accessory specification, enclosure and panel layout, grounding and shielding, pre-energization checks, first power-up and parameter configuration, commissioning, establishing operational baselines, diagnosing common first-week faults, tuning and optimization, and long-term maintenance. Training that focuses only on troubleshooting skips the installation quality issues that cause most field failures.
Does training reduce VFD failures?
Yes, significantly, because more than 80% of early VFD failures trace to installation, commissioning, and configuration errors rather than hardware defects. A technician who can recognize a grounding problem, a cable routing error, an incorrect control mode, or a misapplied carrier frequency setting prevents the failure before it happens. Training addresses the root cause of the failure population, not just the symptoms.