It's possible you'd like your company to pay for or reimburse you for the cost of training. No problem at all. Here are are useful tips and guides to sell investing in training to your boss.

First, it's important to think of training as an investment in yourself. You are developing your own skills to help you not only become more effective in your job, but in fact develop as a person and a professional.

Investing in quality, actionable, practical training exponentially accelerates your career development — you learn what to do and how to do in a much shorter span of time than it would take to "learn on the job", which can take years and involve lots of anguished mistakes that could easily have been avoided.

Furthermore, you want to make sure you're investing in training and development that provides you with tangible and actionable strategies that you can use immediately in your job. Today. Now. Training that combines real-world insights with cutting-edge product management and innovation techniques delivered by an expert and leader who's "been there, done that".

As such, frankly, you should constantly be looking to invest in high quality, effective training and professional development programs, and not necessarily depend on someone else to provide you with the means for it.

That said, any good employer will always be looking to invest in its employees. So if you'd still like to approach your boss about paying for training or reimbursing the cost, here are some tips on how to approach it.

First, find out the following:

• Has the company sent other people on training? If so, what was their feedback? What worked well? What didn’t? How did they persuade the company to send them?
• Is there a budget for training at your company or department?
• Is training discussed as part of personal development plans?

Next, sell the value of the training to the company in terms of how it will benefit you, the team, and your boss.

Here's how the course will benefit you:

• It will enable you to learn best practices, and complete things faster and better.
• It will enable you to pass on skills to other team members. Talk about how you’re going to go about this — e.g., brown bag sessions.
• It will empower you to propose ideas to improve overall team performance.
• It will help you perform better than the product managers at your competitors.

Be sure to address what in the training agenda is directly relevant to your job, and what addresses areas of development for you.

Here's how the course will benefit the team, the company, and your boss:

• Learn best practices and complete things faster and better.
• Get everyone working better together, because everyone will be using the same “language”, tools, and base-level skills.
• Without it, there is a real risk of loss of productivity, because everyone is guessing at best practices, and re-inventing processes and templates.
• Being better at what you do will improve the credibility of the team and the product management function with rest of organization.
• If the team makes bad decisions, that can cost lost revenue measured in the $10,000s, $100,000s, even millions, because the product is unattractive and you won't be able to win business.
• So investing in training helps the team build the right products and pursue the right business opportunities.
• Plus, finally, a high performance team makes boss look good!

Finally, here's what you can say specifically about the course:

• Actionable Course: Based on the course outline, the Idea To Revenue Masterclass course will have tactical and relatable real-world examples, actionable instructions, and tools that I'll be able to immediately apply to my job.
• Practical Product Management: This is a complete course, showing very actionable ways to do everything from testing and validating product ideas, assessing their market potential, creating and pitching the business case for them, to pre-selling and aligning stakeholders. There are few, if any, other online courses that covers these topics in such a comprehensive way.
• Expertise: Shardul has lead product management across a range of industries, in startups and companies like Capital One and Diamond Mind, as well as the U.S. federal government. He has hands-on experience as a mentor at Lean Startup Machine, George Mason University, among others, founded ProductCamp DC, is a frequent speaker on product management and innovation, and runs a popular blog. More on his bio here.
• Value and Savings: It will be a lot less expensive to do this course than pay for an onsite course with potential travel and accommodation expenses. We can agree that as part of my evaluation I will present some key new concepts I learned, and teach them to other members of the team. This helps me cement the information in my mind as well as mentor others.