Another way to trim the cost of your training programs is to centralize your training support, but not your processes.
Let me explain.
First of all, we can probably all agree that decentralized 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 requirements or course description details. But often these differences 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. The result is that it’s difficult for users to find courses, for managers to assign courses to their employees, and for anyone to get reliable reports out of the system. This becomes a serious hindrance to good reporting, auto-enrollment and competency management. The resulting issues can be very costly, both in the short and long term.
So, centralization of learning support 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 learning support is that business units have adequate 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 efficiency of your learning technology or training processes, contact us.
For more information log on to www.expertus.com
