Businesses and employees are both realising the value of professional development and corporate training programs. Almost every employee worth having expects their employers to invest in their future with corporate training.
While doing the same has several benefits for all parties involved, the task of delivering valuable training to employees can sometimes seem a bit pricey.
If you are a startup owner, or involved with a business that is strapped for cash, and are looking for ways to deliver quality corporate training without burning a hole in your pocket, read on:
Have Clear Objectives
This is the most common mistake most businesses make They introduce corporate training to their organisations without understanding the capabilities and needs of their workforce.
Moreover, it is important to understand how training will factor in when it comes to achieving organisational goals.
It is best to conduct employee surveys to understand the needs and capabilities of your organisation and its employees. By analysing the results, business owners can narrow down the best areas to focus their learning and development efforts.
By doing so, business owners can deliver valuable training to their employees, without having to struggle with low completion rates and high costs of delivering training.
Adopt Blended Learning Practices
Blended learning refers to the practice of delivering training with a mix of digitally accessible lessons and instructor-led training (ILT) sessions. Aside from being more effective than traditional corporate training strategies, blended learning practices can effectively bring down the cost of training.
Digital lessons, whether it is a video lesson or an interactive session on a learning management system, is usually cheaper than hiring a trainer. This means, a business will only be paying a trainer for the lessons that absolutely need to be delivered in a classroom. The rest of the course material can be provided to the employees through much more cost effective digital mediums.
Purchase Ready-Made Course Material
If your organisation is not conducting training on extremely specific and rare topics, chances are, you do not have to spend time and resources on creating your own course material.
Instead, simply compare eLearning content providers, choose the one that offers content that aligns with your needs, and start using the content for your corporate training.
Sure, this may not apply to all the training needs of your organisation. However, with this strategy, organisations can potentially cut the cost of developing a lot of their content in-house. The best part is, with professional content providers for eLearning, you don’t have to compromise on the quality of the course content.
Add to that the abundance of options available to businesses looking for course content providers, getting your hands on the right corporate training content has never been easier.
On the other hand, if your business does need to develop training content in-house, the next point describes a way to bring down development time and cost. Read on!
Consider Investing In A Rapid Authoring Tool
Rapid authoring tools are, as the name suggests, tools designed to reduce the time taken to develop training material. When the man hours are reduced, the cost is also naturally reduced.
However, don’t let the reduced turnaround times fool you.
Rapid authoring tools feature eLearning templates, interactions, cut-out templates, images, and just about everything else you need to reduce turnaround times without hurting quality.
However, keep in mind that just like other with other softwares, rapid authoring tools are also offered by a number of vendors.
Most of them offer free trials, and business owners are recommended to try at least a few options before coming to a decision. If you don’t choose the right authoring tool, it may end up increasing the course creation time instead of reducing it.
Invest In Microlearning
Just like blended learning, microlearning is another practice that is known to improve results for learners. In essence, microlearning is the practice of delivering lessons in short, bite-sized (5-20 minutes) modules along with interactive exercises.
Microlearning does not just have the potential to positively affect the completion rates of your corporate training efforts, but when used smartly, can help you reduce training costs, while also helping improve employee output.
For instance, instead of long, time-consuming courses, employees can be strategically made to consume bite-sized training materials that give them the knowledge required to improve on their daily tasks.
Similarly, employees that have the potential to become leaders in the future can be prepared for such roles with short and specialised training modules.
Repurpose Training Material
This tip is meant for the businesses that have been engaged in training activities for a while. If your business has been using online training material for your employees, it is time for an analysis.
Analyse your existing course material to understand how it aligns with your current learning objectives? Are there fragments, videos, lesson recordings, quizzes, or anything else that can be used for your new learners?
For instance, recorded instructor led training can be broken down into smaller videos and used to deliver specific, bite-sized training modules.
As your training needs grow and you create new training content, it will benefit from your existing content repository, and the new content can be added to your repository for future use.
This way, as you collect more training material, your repository will have more media and content you can repurpose.
Make Use Of Templates
This tip is especially meant for businesses that engage in compliance training. Regular revisions in compliance standards require businesses to update their training materials accordingly.
However, the same has been a known factor in driving up the cost of delivering quality training.
This cost can be effectively cut with the use of templates. Every time a new policy or regulation is introduced, all you have to do is edit the template instead of having to start from scratch.
This strategy can help your business save on invaluable man-hours while effectively reducing the costs of delivering training.
Conclusion
The seven strategies mentioned in this article are meant to help you reduce the cost of delivering effective training to your employees.
Which of these are you planning to try? Tell us about them or any questions you may have, in the comment section below.
Author Bio: Sarah Williams is a successful business woman who has a great interest in diverse subjects. She has learned a lot at the hands of every experience – good or bad. Her write-ups are a true manifestation of her rich experiences and her eventful life.
