Employees who participate in EdAssist education benefits stay an average of 3.2 years longer than non-participants and generate a net ROI of $25,512 per participant through reduced turnover alone.
So why are so many tuition assistance programs still being managed as a compliance checkbox?
The answer is consistent across organizations: silos. The cost shows up in talent gaps, turnover, and workforce development initiatives that never quite get off the ground.
Built in Silos Webinar: Why Your Education Benefits Aren't Doing Their Best Work
The insights featured are summarized from a recent EdAssist webinar, Built in Silos: Why Your Education Benefits Aren’t Doing Their Best Work. It covers why HR silos persist even when leaders know better, what each function wants from an education benefits program, and the framework EdAssist uses to help organizations align priorities and drive measurably better results.
Why HR Silos Persist Even When Everyone Knows They Shouldn't
Most HR leaders already understand that cross-functional alignment would improve their education assistance programs. Four structural barriers keep those silos in place:
Sponsor turnover resets progress. Large-scale HR restructuring is common, and when it happens, any cross-functional momentum built around the education program tends to evaporate. Just as the right conversations start, a key sponsor changes roles, and the process either pauses or starts over entirely.
No one owns the coordination. In most organizations, reaching across functions is additional work that sits outside everyone's job description. Stakeholders are already stretched thin, and cross-functional coordination is easy to deprioritize when no one is held accountable for it.
The right contacts are hard to identify. Especially in large organizations undergoing restructuring, people often don't know who to pull in from other functions, which means the right stakeholders don’t always make it into the room.
Office dynamics get in the way. There's a persistent, and largely unchallenged, assumption that workforce skills strategy and education benefits are separate organizational concerns. Bridging that gap can feel like overstepping, even when the connection is obvious.
When those barriers stay in place, each function optimizes for its own definition of success. Benefits track utilization. L&D measures completions. Talent acquisition monitors offer acceptance rates. No one is measuring what the program is doing for the organization, and the education benefits never reaches its full potential.
These barriers and how to address them are covered in depth in the on-demand webinar.
What Each HR Function Actually Wants from Education Benefits
The path to cross-functional alignment starts with understanding what each team is trying to solve for because the priorities are different, and each one is legitimate.
Benefits teams want optimal learner experiences, clear and defensible policies, and administrative processes that don't require constant intervention. They're focused on making the program accessible, affordable, and easy to communicate to employees at every level.
L&D teams are building skills programs and workforce readiness initiatives, often independently of the education assistance program sitting in Benefits. Many L&D leaders don't yet see tuition assistance as a lever they can pull to support their own skilling goals.
Talent acquisition is looking for ways to differentiate in competitive hiring markets without permanently escalating base compensation. Education benefits are one of the most effective tools in that toolkit, particularly for roles where candidates are weighing multiple offers.
Individual business units are managing cost centers and worrying about their own talent pipelines. They're often more interested in targeted relationships with specific educational providers than in broad program access, and they want to see a direct line between the education investment and the skills their teams need.
The priorities aren't in conflict. The problem is that these conversations happen in separate rooms and separate conversations. This lack of alignment between silos means education programs don’t work across the organization.
The Shift That Changes Everything: From Stakeholder Needs to Organizational Priorities
The organizations seeing the strongest results from their education benefits programs have shifted the conversation away from individual stakeholder needs and toward what the organization needs as a whole.
EdAssist facilitates this through structured discovery sessions. Before any client meeting, the team pulls competitive benchmarks, labor market data, and program performance metrics. Cross-functional leaders come into the room prepared, and the session is structured as a discovery conversation — mapping the existing learning ecosystem, surfacing gaps, and identifying where the education program is and isn't doing real work.
Every discussion anchors around three priority buckets:
- Accessibility and engagement: How to remove financial barriers, offer programs that are relevant at any career stage, and build flexible learning options that employees will actually use
- Talent pipeline: How to use the education program to actively build the workforce capabilities the organization needs, both now and in the future
- Cost efficiency: How to ensure that every dollar invested in education generates a return the business can measure and defend
Starting from organizational priorities rather than individual stakeholder needs changes both the conversation and the program that comes out of it.
The Framework for a High-Performing Education Benefits Program
Once the organization has defined its priorities, EdAssist works through a three-phase program design:
Phase 1: Revisit program foundations. Before designing anything new, define what success looks like. That means establishing measurable outcomes — graduation and promotion rates, retention and tenure analysis, the percentage of critical roles filled from within — and agreeing on how they'll be tracked from day one.
Phase 2: Curate targeted programs. Broad access to any accredited institution is a feature, not a strategy. The most effective programs move toward intentional curation: identifying the specific skills the organization needs, then selecting educational pathways — including non-degree credentials, certificates, and certifications — that build those skills at a lower cost and faster timeline than traditional degree programs.
Phase 3: Map career pathways. Without a connection to visible career advancement, employees see the benefit as a perk rather than a path — and utilization reflects that. Mapping learning options to specific roles and growth opportunities gives the program a clarity that drives both engagement and retention.
This framework has been applied across healthcare, aerospace & defense, financial services, and telecom. The structure is consistent across industries; the customization comes in the skills focus, the provider curation, and the career mapping, which vary significantly depending on the workforce.
Addressing the Two Objections That Come Up Every Time
"We already have internal training for those skills."
It's a useful starting point. EdAssist's goal is never to duplicate existing L&D investments. The discovery process maps what's already in place, identifies where genuine gaps exist, and determines where strategic education programming can fill those gaps without duplicating or competing with what's working internally. The goal is integration, not replacement.
"We don't have the budget to expand."
A seemingly tight budget for education benefits may reflect misaligned priorities rather than an actual lack of resources. Organizations that are spending heavily on graduate degree programs while struggling to fill critical skills gaps aren’t always because of budget.
How to redesign toward cost efficiency:
- Shifting from graduate degree-heavy programs toward lower-cost non-degree pathways that build targeted skills faster
- Leveraging EdAssist's provider network, which averages 2x the standard network discount for targeted programs
- Building the internal business case around the ROI of upskilling versus the cost of external hiring for critical roles
Two Client Results Worth Knowing
Read how two clients successfully navigated conversations across functions to remove silos and, more importantly, drive significant ROI with their education benefit programs.
Financial Services: Building a Business Case for Critical Skills
An enterprise learning lead came to EdAssist with a clear mandate: close critical skills gaps that internal training wasn't addressing. Working together, they identified the specific skills her organization needed most and paired them with targeted non-degree programming, including certificates and certifications.
She used the resulting framework to build an internal business case and took it on a stakeholder roadshow to secure cross-functional buy-in before launch. The results after launch showed:
- 22% year-over-year increase in program utilization with only a 10% increase in total education investment.
- 20% of graduates completed non-degree programs in the targeted skills track.
- 97% retention rate among participants in the program since launch.
Healthcare: From Benefits Line Item to Workforce Development Driver
A healthcare client added a non-degree critical skills program to their existing education benefit. The benefits team drove the initial decision, but the outcomes shifted how leadership thinks about the program entirely. It's now being transitioned from Benefits into Workforce Development, because the results made clear it belongs at the center of their talent strategy:
- 77% increase in program engagement with flat investment per participant.
- A new initiative is underway to assess how AI is reshaping job roles across the organization, with the education program serving as the primary vehicle for supporting those transitions.
Want to hear these client stories in full? Watch the on-demand webinar.
Where to Start: A Realistic One-Year Plan
Breaking down silos and improving education benefits ROI doesn't require assembling every stakeholder in a room on day one. EdAssist recommends a sequenced approach that builds momentum without overwhelming an organization that's already managing competing priorities:
- Cross-functional discovery sessions to align organizational priorities, surface gaps in the current program, and establish a shared north star
- Current program analysis that takes stock of what's working, what needs adjustment, and where the learning ecosystem has genuine holes
- Pilot launch of a targeted program focused on an immediate, well-defined skills need, with metrics established before the first employee enrolls
Most of the clients seeing strong results started with a single well-defined pilot. The roadmap grows from there.
If your education benefits program is due for a closer look, EdAssist can start with a program assessment specific to your organization, industry, and workforce priorities.
Watch the on-demand webinar or schedule a conversation with the EdAssist team.
