Asset ready.
People ready?

Cost of a week = capital × annual rate ÷ 52 + weekly standby + monthly revenue × 12 ÷ 52 × margin. Costs already incurred count once, through the carrying cost of capital.

Readiness budget prices the route you choose on the timing tile: with Overtly, people × courses per person × fee per certificate; with a traditional build, development hours (months per course × courses × 7.5 hours × 21.7 days) × your team's hourly cost, USD 40 by default as Overtly's assumption, below Overtly's own production rate of USD 100 because a traditional team may be cheaper by the hour; with your own estimate, the quote. Every route adds new hires × recruiting cost, expert curation and the skills readiness assessment. The assessment is sized by the catalogue it has to cover, in short-course equivalents: a certificate program counts as 5, a professional program as 10, a course as 1.7 and a short course as 1, so one certificate program, three courses or five short courses all come to 5. Days = 1 + 0.4 × equivalents, one day to frame and report plus four tenths of a day each, at USD 2,000 a day. That puts 5 equivalents at 3 days and 10 at a week. Past about 40, four professional programs or the same breadth in smaller courses, one assessment cannot see the ground properly and the work should be split into projects by domain. It cannot be skipped: Overtly's build times hold only once it is done. If your catalogue is already structured, choose the short version, which keeps the framing and report day and halves the time per equivalent, because the work is confirming the structure against what the operation needs. The assessment is credited in full when the program is built with Overtly and its certificate fees cover it. Your people do not pay, so prices are Overtly's sponsored fee per certificate: USD 20, 40, 60 or 100 by course type, plus a publishing deposit per course credited back against the first certificates.

Break-even = readiness budget ÷ cost of a week: the delay readiness would have to avoid to pay for itself, not a promise that it will.

Build with Overtly = (build days for the course type + review days for its complexity) × (1 + (courses − 1) × the share each additional course adds). Build days per course: Short course 5, Course 10, Certificate program 25, Professional program 50; from your own material about half. Reviews: half a day, 2 days or 5 days. Build times and the certificate fees cover basic development; full audiobooks, high production video and advanced analytics tools are priced separately. Overtly builds a course when it certifies enough people to justify production (from 90 to 180 certificates a course, by type and complexity); below that, your team builds on Overtly Studio and the time is your estimate. These build times assume the skills readiness assessment has been done. Your own build estimate is a total you enter, for example a quote from a vendor or your team; it is not credited against the assessment. Traditional build = months per course, with all courses built in parallel by default, or × the number of batches if your team builds a few at a time (courses ÷ courses at a time, rounded up), after the same assessment. Building in parallel changes the calendar, not the readiness budget, which never carries the traditional team's cost. Months per course follow the course type rather than sitting at one number for all of them, because a 9 hour short course and a 112 hour professional program do not cost a design team the same: 2.4, 6.4, 15.9 and 29.6 months for one designer, from 43 development hours per finished hour of instruction at 7.5 hours a day and 21.7 working days a month. Edit it if your team is faster.

Formal learning = courses per person × learning hours per course ÷ hours a week each learner gives to training. Learning hours per course follow Overtly's pacing: Short course 9, Course 24, Certificate program 60, Professional program 112. Uncapped means training is their job, at 35 hours a week. Time on the job before working unsupervised is set mainly by the complexity of the work, not by class time: 2, 3.5 or 6 months for standard, site-specific or safety-critical work, adjusted a little for program size (short course 0.65, course 0.8, certificate program 1, professional program 1.2). People apply what they learn as they go rather than waiting for the last lesson, so 60 percent of it runs alongside formal learning, as far as the courses last, and only the remainder extends the timeline. A professional program at safety-critical complexity comes to 7.2 months of practice, inside the 6 to 12 months on the job the IEA reports for a wind turbine technician after 12 to 24 months of vocational training, in selected OECD countries.

Lead time = the longer of recruiting and (assessment + build), then formal learning, then the part of time on the job that runs past it. Latest start = ready date minus lead time.

Cost of capital, by setting. The rate is the annual cost of the money tied up in the asset, and it depends on who is paying and where. The settings run from government backed to high risk. Public sector, real rates: 3.5 percent is HM Treasury's Green Book rate for the first 30 years of an appraisal (2026), and the European Commission gives 3 percent as a reference point where a member state has no rate of its own (2021); 7 percent is the base case of US Office of Management and Budget Circular A-94, the 1992 text, which was reinstated in April 2025 when the 2023 revision was revoked; 9 percent is the Asian Development Bank's minimum required return for investment projects in its developing member countries, with 6 percent for social sector, poverty-targeting and environmental projects (2017). Commercial, nominal US dollars after tax: about 8 percent is the cost of capital of US listed companies excluding financials, 7.72 percent, and about 10 percent that of emerging-market listed companies, 9.76 percent, both from Aswath Damodaran's January 2026 data. About 15 percent for a frontier or high-risk setting is computed here and not stated by any source: the US figure plus Damodaran's country risk premium for B rated sovereigns, 5.83 to 8.41 percentage points, gives 13.6 to 16.1 percent, and Caa ratings would add 9.71 to 12.95 points instead. Applying the premium to all of the capital, not only the equity, makes this the cautious end. As a cross-check, the International Energy Agency's survey of utility-scale solar projects in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa found 8.5 to 13.5 percent in 2024, in local currency, nominal and after tax (2025). Public rates are real and commercial ones nominal; they are not interchangeable, so choose the kind your own appraisal uses. Listed-company figures describe firms, not single projects, and the three commercial settings rest on one dataset: treat them as starting points, and use your finance team's rate for the asset where you have one.

By sector. Cost of capital in nominal US dollars after tax, from Damodaran's January 2026 data for listed companies. Use it to move the commercial setting up or down for your sector.

Development hours per finished hour of instruction are from Chapman Alliance, September 2010, a survey of 249 organisations and 3,947 learning development professionals: 43 for instructor led, 79 for Level 1 eLearning, 184 for Level 2 and 490 for Level 3. This tool uses 43, the instructor-led figure and the lowest of the four, because the comparison on this page is the one a capital committee will push back on hardest and it should hold without argument. Level 1 is the closer description of the artefact and would roughly double the traditional months. Build ladders, review times, assessment sizing, thresholds, the 50 percent share per additional course, learning hours per course, the 35 hour week, and the months of practice on the job with their size factors and 60 percent overlap are Overtly's own figures; the traditional months are a starting point to replace with your own team's rate. Damodaran's figures are updated each January; check prices and rates before relying on this after January 2027.