Reduce your training costs with blended learning

In a recent survey by Expertus, it was found that the most important strategy that learning organizations are exploring to reduce the cost of training delivery is to migrate instructor-led training either to ‘blended learning’ or to look into elearning development. The benefits here are obvious – cost reductions in travel, facilities, equipment, and trainers.

However, organizations should not focus only on cost reduction. They must also work to leverage the other benefits of blended and elearning development such as, availability, reusability, efficiency, and above all, scalability.

Elearning can be available 24/7, but the organizations don’t have to offer their entire content as classic elearning modules. Properly designed and broken down into small pieces to use, e-learning can be used when there is a need for time-of-need training, alerts, or performance support. Organizations should consider looking at smaller learning modules, although it might demand some training content conversion into reference materials, lists, diagrams, stories, or lessons learned.

A great deal of value can be secured if certain information is made available quickly, and in an easy-to-digest form. One option might be to implement some training outside the LMS. If you can not configure the LMS to access the content quickly and easily, then put the developed content outside. Eliminating the requirement to track it will make it easier for learners to access and absorb the content faster.

For more details on this and for more ways of increasing your training efficiency, please download our recent webinar recording or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at http://www.trainingefficiency.com/.

If your organization is thinking about repurposing your ILT content into ELearning, creating content without compromise or if you’re interested in increasing the efficiency of your learning technology infrastructure, contact me.

Effective training administration

First of all, we can probably all agree that decentralized training administration is inefficient.

It becomes a problem when there are multiple administrators in multiple groups completing the same tasks or transactions, but doing it in multiple ways. Various groups within an organization have differences in their processes and procedures, such as registration needs or course description details. But often these variations are driven by lack of bandwidth or minimal training.

Take as an example the process of uploading courses to an LMS. If an organization has various people doing this, it’s common to see different administrators using different course-naming schemes and course descriptions.

So, centralization of learning support and learning operations management is critical, which goes without saying.

On the flipside, it’s not a good idea to develop inflexible processes that don’t adapt to the needs of your customers, the business units. Be careful about trying to eliminate customized support that they’ve grown accustomed to. Dissatisfaction quickly rises when executives feel their needs and interests are not heard, considered, and acted upon.

Establishing a decentralized approach to customer training support is that business units have enough control over employee learning and can tailor all aspects of learning to the specific needs of their employees.  Long term, you get ever closer to the elusive goal of aligning learning with business objectives.

To learn more about the concept of Centralized Services and Decentralized Processes, download the white paper.

For more information on this topic and the nine ways to trim operational expense, please download the recent webinar or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at http://www.trainingefficiency.com/.

If your organization wants to increase the training efficiency in terms of your learning technology or training processes, contact us.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com