The concept of assessing the return on investment of training and performance improvement programs is rapidly growing in prominence.  This is due in large part to competition for scarce organizational resources combined with pressure on managers to demonstrate positive returns on their organization’s invested capital.  This paper takes a descriptive approach to exploring the rationale for assessing return on investment of training and performance improvement programs, and summarizes various methods and considerations associated with such assessments.  Assessing the return on investment of training and performance improvement programs can help managers to identify the most cost effective options when selecting from a variety training and performance improvement alternatives, and can help organizations to justify and defend their training and performance improvement budgets.