Most people who get in touch with us about an IWFM qualification have already decided they want to do it. What they’re less sure about is how to get it past whoever holds the training budget.

That’s a fair worry, because training costs money and it takes you away from the day job for a while, so your manager is going to ask what the business gets back.

FM training is easier to make the case for than you’d think

A lot of what a qualified facilities manager does shows up on a spreadsheet somewhere: energy bills, contractor invoices, insurance claims, absence figures. That gives you real numbers to point to, which plenty of other departments would love to have when they’re asking for training.

Below we go through how to use them, and how to shape the case around the person you’re asking.

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Start with who you’re asking

Before you write a word, work out who’s going to read it, because the same case can go down very differently with different people.

  • An experienced facilities manager who’s been there before. If they’ve done a qualification themselves, they probably don’t need convincing about the value. What they might need is something to justify the spend to their own boss, so give them the numbers and make it easy to pass on. If they worked their way  up through hard graft, hands-on knowledge and a fair bit of trial and error, they could reasonably ask why you need a qualification when they didn’t. Your case there is about what the qualification adds on top of that experience, in areas like procurement, compliance and sustainability strategy.
  • Training, HR or Learning and Development. They understand qualifications in general but may not have a clear picture of how FM training feeds through to business results, so they’ll want specifics.
  • Finance. They’ll skip straight to the figures, so put the figures first: cost, time out of the business and what you expect to get back for it.
Student approaching university campus

Show the return in four areas

It helps to present the request as an investment with a measurable return rather than a line in the training budget. We’d group that return into four areas: cost savings, risk mitigation, ESG outcomes and employee productivity, which between them cover most of what a board will want to hear about.

You don’t need to lean on all four equally, so pick the two that matter most to your organisation and lead with those.

1 . Cost savings

Facilities costs can account for up to 30% of total operating expenditure in office-based businesses, according to the British Council for Offices. With an overhead that size, even small percentage improvements turn into proper money.

A few figures worth borrowing:

  • Maintenance: preventative maintenance led by trained FMs can reduce repair costs by 12 to 18% a year (Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers).
  • Procurement: high-performing procurement and asset management in FM can deliver 5 to 10% cost savings annually (McKinsey).
  • Energy: one IWFM Level 4 qualified facilities manager led a workplace energy initiative at a UK healthcare organisation that cut energy consumption by 22%, saving over £45,000 a year.

The figures get much more persuasive when you apply them to your own site. A 12% cut on £200,000 of annual repair costs is £24,000, and that’s the bottom of the CIBSE range.

Try this: pull last year’s reactive maintenance spend, the number of suppliers you manage and the energy bill, then apply a cautious percentage to each.

Finding and getting rid of just one inefficient supplier contract or process can cover the cost of the training on its own, often within the first year.

2. Risk mitigating

Risk is harder to put a number on, because the cost only shows up when something goes wrong, and by then it’s usually a big one. Under the Sentencing Council’s guidelines, health and safety fines for large organisations can reach £10 million.

Fire safety obligations keep shifting too, with legislation like the Building Safety Act 2022 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022.

A Zurich Insurance study found that 65% of commercial property losses stem from avoidable FM-related issues such as faulty HVAC, water damage or poor maintenance, and the fact that those losses could have been avoided is the part to make sure your reader notices.

Try this: list the compliance obligations your site carries and who is currently responsible for each one. If there are gaps, or if one person is holding a lot of it in their head, say so in your case.

IWFM qualifications cover compliance obligations, safety standards and business continuity planning, so the request becomes a way of reducing the chance of an expensive and very public problem.

3. ESG outcomes

Buildings and construction are responsible for 39% of global energy-related carbon emissions, with 28% coming from operating buildings day to day (World Green Building Council). UK businesses are working towards Net Zero by 2050, sooner in many sectors, and reporting frameworks like TCFD and SECR mean someone has to produce the data.

FMs know they need to be ready for this. In IWFM’s 2021 Sustainability Survey, almost nine in 10 respondents said upskilling was necessary, but far fewer were planning to do any in the following year. If your organisation has published sustainability targets, that gap makes a strong point in a business case.

It also connects straight back to cost. The Carbon Trust says low and no-cost measures alone can usually cut energy costs by at least 10%, with quick returns.

Try this: Have a look at your company’s annual report or website for its ESG commitments and tie the qualification to them by name. When a board has made a promise in public, showing how training helps them keep it carries a lot of weight.

4. Employee productivity

This is the one HR teams tend to respond to. According to the Leesman Index, 43% of employees globally don’t agree that their workplace enables them to work productively, and in the UK it’s 46%.

The World Green Building Council has found that better air quality and ventilation can improve productivity by 8 to 11%, that better lighting design improves output by up to 23%, and that access to natural elements like plants and daylight reduces sick days by 10%.

Try this: Demonstrate that a qualified FM understands how to design efficient layouts, manage HVAC and lighting for comfort and efficiency, set cleaning regimes that cut the spread of illness, and use occupancy data to shape the workplace around how people use it. Those things show up in absence rates and retention, which HR already measures.

Student approaching university campus

Putting the case together

A business case doesn’t need to be long. Two pages that someone reads properly will do far more than a twenty-page document that gets ignored. 

A structure along these lines works well:

  1. What you’re asking for. The qualification and level, how it’s delivered, the cost and the time away from work. Be upfront about the time, as it’s often a bigger worry than the fee. If it helps, show the options: distance learning fits around the day job, while a Qual-in-a-Week course gets the taught element done in one concentrated block.
  2. The problem or opportunity. Something specific to your organisation, such as rising energy costs, an audit on the horizon, published ESG targets or a reactive maintenance budget that keeps creeping up.
  3. The return. Two or three of the four areas above, with numbers applied to your own site wherever you can.
  4. The payback. A cautious estimate of when the savings cover the cost, which is often within 12 months.
  5. What you’ll do with it. Offer to take on a specific project as you study, like a supplier review or an energy audit, so the business sees the benefit early.
  6. Who’s delivering it. Your reader will want to know the money is going somewhere reputable. Xenon was the first provider accredited by IWFM to deliver the full suite of qualifications from Level 3 to Level 6, our tutors are all experienced operational FMs, and we hold the only ISO 9001 accreditation in the FM qualification industry.

A few things that make it easier to say yes

  • Describe the benefits the way your reader would. “Reduced reactive maintenance spend” and “lower compliance risk” will get further with a finance director than “professional development”, even though they describe the same course.
  • Keep your numbers cautious. A modest estimate that holds up under questioning is far more convincing than an ambitious one that falls apart the moment someone asks where it came from, so take the low end of each range and say where it’s from.
  • Think about timing. If your organisation sets training budgets once a year, a case that lands just before that conversation has a much better chance than one that arrives after the money has been allocated.

If you’d like to talk through which IWFM level suits your role, or which way of studying fits around your workload, get in touch with the team and we’ll help you put together the details your case needs.

Chris Morris – Xenon Group Director

Chris has spent the past 15 years working in the field of Facilities Management training and qualifications, teaching facilities managers how to be the best they can be.

A strategist and creative thinker, Chris is also a former chair of the IWFM Rising FMs group, a contributor to Facilitate magazine and iFM.net and a firm believer in the value of identifying and developing the strengths of an organisation’s people.