It is a fair question. A lot of professional development spending is hard to attribute. People attend workshops, fill in feedback forms, and return to their desks. Whether anything substantively changes – whether they communicate more clearly, influence more effectively, handle difficult conversations better – is much harder to measure, and most organisations do not try.

Before getting to the numbers, it is worth being precise about what communication training should change. The bar is not whether participants enjoyed the session, though that matters. The bar is whether the experience shifted something real: whether someone who struggled to structure an argument under pressure can now do it with more confidence, whether a team that avoided direct challenge has started to use it productively, whether a leader who defaulted to broadcasting has learned to listen and adapt in real time.

These changes are harder to observe than a post-session survey score. But they show up in specific, measurable ways – in how people talk about the training months later, in what they apply back in the room, and in whether they recommend the experience to colleagues without being prompted.

Across our training programmes, we track a small number of metrics consistently: a Net Promoter Score, ratings for overall session quality, perceived impact on career and personal development, and facilitator effectiveness.

The results across our tracked client engagements are as follows.

Our combined NPS sits at 79. For context, an NPS above 70 is typically considered world-class in service industries. Participants rate the overall quality of their sessions at an average of 4.84 out of 5. They rate the perceived impact of the training on their career or personal development at 4.64 out of 5. This suggests the experience does not feel theoretical to the people in the room. It feels applicable. And they rate facilitator effectiveness at 4.89 out of 5, which reflects the central role that skilled, experienced facilitation plays in whether communication training actually lands.

Across all of our client engagements, around 81% of participants completed feedback forms – a completion rate that is unusually high for post-training evaluation, and one that suggests engagement with the process rather than passive tolerance of it.

Numbers from immediate post-session surveys are useful, but the more meaningful signal comes from what people say and do months after the training has finished.

When Deloitte brought us in to work with around 3,000 professionals, from Assistant Managers to Directors, they reported that the vast majority said they would recommend the training to colleagues – and were, in their own words, still enthusiastic about it six months later. The specific skills that participants highlighted were the ability to process complex information quickly and to influence with confidence: both of which are durable, high-stakes capabilities rather than presentation-day polish.

Standard Chartered, which brought us in to support the implementation of its diversity and inclusion strategy for Global Financial Markets teams, noted that despite initial scepticism from some senior participants – a reaction that is not uncommon when experienced professionals are asked to engage with something that feels unfamiliar – the impact in the room was clear, and the programme was described internally as a great success.

These are qualitative accounts. But they point to something the numbers alone cannot fully capture: that the methodology works not just when conditions are easy, but when participants arrive sceptical, when the stakes are high, and when the skills being trained are ones that need to perform under genuine pressure.

The results above are not independent of how the training is delivered. They are a direct product of it.

Our approach is built on a simple premise: that communication skills are learned by practising them in high-challenge, low-risk conditions, not by watching a presentation about what good communication looks like.

Participants are put in situations where they have to structure arguments under time pressure, respond to challenges in real time, argue positions they may not personally hold, and receive immediate, specific feedback from facilitators who are skilled at making that feedback useful rather than just evaluative.

This is uncomfortable in ways that are productive. It is also what produces behaviour change that lasts, because the skill has been built through repetition rather than absorbed through exposure.

The high facilitator scores reflect this. A facilitated debate session is only as effective as the person running it — their ability to push participants without undermining them, to model the kind of thinking they are asking participants to do, and to create the conditions in which it feels safe to take risks with language and argument. This is a specific and demanding skill, and it is not separable from the impact the training produces.

One feature of our model that is relevant to any business case discussion is its structure as a social enterprise. Profits from commercial training directly fund our school programmes, which run debating clubs in schools in areas of high educational disadvantage. Those programmes reach thousands of students per year, with measurable gains in confidence, communication, and critical thinking among young people who would otherwise have limited access to this kind of development.

For organisations that are active on social value, ESG commitments, or diversity and social mobility goals, this linkage is more than incidental. Investing in communication training with Debate Mate contributes directly to a pipeline of confident, articulate young people entering the labour market – which is a credible, evidence-based impact rather than a brand association.

The evidence base for communication training is often treated as inherently soft – harder to pin down than technical training, harder to quantify than process improvement. That perception is partly a function of how training is typically evaluated: too quickly, too superficially, and without any attempt to connect the immediate experience to longer-term behaviour change.

When evaluation is done properly, tracking not just whether people enjoyed the session but whether they applied something, and whether that application produced outcomes, the picture is more concrete.

Communication is the skill that enables every other skill to be visible. When people can structure an argument, respond under pressure, influence without status, and listen with enough precision to change their response accordingly, they perform better across almost every role and function. Training that builds those capabilities is not hard to justify. The harder thing, usually, is choosing a methodology that actually works.

Debate Mate Training delivers communication and leadership programmes for professionals at all career stages, from graduates to board-level executives. If you’d like to explore what a programme could look like for your team, we’d be glad to talk, and subscribe to our newsletter HERE for weekly thinking on communication, leadership and workplace performance.