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.

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.