Ways to manage training effectively with slashed budgets

The research we conducted recently with www.TrainingIndustry.com has been useful to training organizations across the country, as training budgets are slashed and money becomes tighter.

Our most important recommendation for getting the most value out of your training budget is to focus on managing your training organization like a business.

This could be done by knowing your training organization’s core competency, and your true value to the company as a whole. If you don’t add value through training administration or application management, then it would be apt to shed that work or find ways of streamlining it. Apart from these two areas, training content development is one other area of this kind- typically these are the best areas for improving efficiency and offloading responsibilities.

Our research revealed that the average cost of administering a training program is around 40% of a total training budget. Streamlining or shedding some of these responsibilities allows you to redeploy a percentage of your training budget to more important and valuable services like training delivery and content development, which helps you, obtain a greater ROI. Business process reengineering and outsourcing helps your training organization operate in a more strategic way. This is done by allowing you to focus on designing and delivering learning initiatives that have direct impact on your company’s   performance improvement and competitive position.

During this slow economy and financial crunch it is also important to market your training programs. Building a training program alone will not help in getting higher learner enrollment. This is especially true if you’re shifting from ILT to more cost-effective models such as e-learning development. This is a cultural shift and requires internal marketing to achieve a reasonable adoption rate.

To learn more about this concept and to learn how to eliminate training waste, download our white paper.

If you need to know how to increase the training efficiency of your learning organization, feel free to contact me.

Consequences of distributed training administration

Today many training organizations face the challenge of spending less money and providing more training than ever before, this obviously is to achieve increased training efficiency.

How do learning executives balance spending and results? In a recent study by Training Industry, Inc. and Expertus, half of training executives said that one of their top challenges when it comes to learning measurement is data accuracy and standardization. The effectiveness with which the training money is spent and the efficiency of the training organization is in doubt if this is not resolved.

Organizing the training operations and processes which results in a uniformity in data management is the solution to this.

The biggest enemy of data standardization is distributed training administration, which is notoriously inefficient and inaccurate. That’s because there are multiple people in multiple groups completing the same tasks, but doing it in multiple ways. Various groups within an organization have differences in their processes and procedures, such as registration requirements or course descriptions. Often these process differences are driven by structures or challenges within their skill sets or a lack of bandwidth. The issues that crop up as a result of this can be very costly, both in the short and long term.

For example the process of uploading courses into an LMS. If an organization has various people doing the task, they generally use their own course-naming schemes and their own course descriptions. The result is that it’s difficult for users to find the training they need and managers don’t know what courses to assign to their employees. This acts as a serious obstacle to auto-enrollment and competency management and training utilization stays at a low level.

By centralizing this service, an organization can protect each group or department’s unique needs, while standardizing the important aspects of each of these individual processes and improve resource utilization.

To learn more about this concept and to learn the other 8 ways to eliminate training waste, download the white paper.

If you need advice on how to increase the efficiency of your training organization, feel free to contact me.

Fast-track your training programs with Customer training portals

Customer attention is vital to business success, especially during difficult economic times. That’s when successful companies shift into high gear with training programs that strengthen customer ties, accelerate product adoption and boost profitability. While we at Expertus examined how to align customer learning with business goals to create powerful marketing strategies that fill classrooms and increase training revenues, we explored ways of fast-tracking training programs in a slow economy. One important way is to improve the effectiveness of the customer training Portal or Website.

It’s clear in this age of the Internet that anything a training organization is doing online is better than anything it does offline. Accessing a learning management system (LMS) in real time through a Website or portal is by far the easiest way. Studies have clearly shown that it’s inadvisable for customer trainees to access the LMS directly. That’s because most LMSs are usually very cumbersome and difficult for people who aren’t experts in using it. Improving the effectiveness of learning portals or Websites is not that difficult. The one key that’s probably more important than anything else on the site is that it isn’t about the colors, it isn’t about the content that’s there—it’s about search functionality. It’s important that customers with questions can quickly and easily find the answer—and not to the first page of a 30-page white paper, or the beginning of a video. Can the customer seeking knowledge search the white paper, the video, the audio, the slides, the classroom materials and whatever else by using one federated search engine? It’s vitally important to focus on the user experience. LMSs aren’t really geared to this, so organizations have to find a better way. Relying on the IT organization to build something is one approach, but training organizations typically are not the principal concern of IT staffs. The best way to do this is by focusing on search and the user experience. And the best way to do that is by learning portal development that takes these issues into account.

If your organization is thinking about developing a learning portal or if you are interested in increasing the training efficiency of your learning organization, feel free to contact me.