How to Lower the Cost of Corporate Training

Corporate training plays a key role in educating employees and supplying individuals with the information they need to make smart decisions that benefit the business and deliver a positive ROI. But if you aren’t careful, your training costs can become exorbitant – ultimately rendering your efforts worthless. The solution is to develop a corporate training strategy that’s influential, yet cost-effective.

Practical Ways to Lower Training Costs

Anyone can lower training costs. The question is, can you find a way to lower training costs without diminishing the quality of the training? After all, one without the other is quite useless.

While every small business will ultimately have to determine the best approach based on their own unique circumstances, here are some suggestions worth exploring:

• Hire the Right People

The first piece of advice is to hire the right people. And by the right people, we mean:

• Individuals who already have some experience in the field and aren’t coming into the job cold turkey. When you hire people with some firsthand knowledge, you naturally don’t need to invest as much training to get them up and running.
• Individuals who show signs of being willing to learn and quick to pick up new knowledge. This will smooth out some of the friction that typically occurs between teaching and application.

If you can consistently hire people who have experience and are quick learners, you’ll find that you don’t need a million-dollar training program to successfully onboard. You’ll also discover that your ongoing training becomes less time intensive over the years. As a result, costs go down and productivity increases (both of which positively boost the bottom line).

• Use Video

The days of using an in-person instructor to teach a class may officially be in the past. While there’s still value in having face-to-face instruction, much of the modern training process can be handled through video.

“Using video for corporate training lowers costs by reducing the need for live onsite training sessions eliminating expenditures related to travel and the creation of physical classrooms,” Intelligent Video Solutions explains. “Corporations use video in a variety of ways from training on new products to coaching to onboarding of employees.”

For small businesses, recorded video training is perfectly adequate. For companies with multiple locations and employees spread out across the country, live video training is an excellent way to maximize resources and still retain that personal feel that employees like.

• Try a Learning Management System

Don’t have the time or expertise to develop a training program from scratch? Don’t want to spend thousands of dollars purchasing a product that’s loosely tailored to your organization? The best option is to use a software as a service (SaaS) learning management system.

“There are multiple companies which provide SaaS (cloud-based) Learning Management Systems,” industry insider Bobby Handzhiev writes. “The big advantage is that while the learning content will be created by you and meet all your specific needs you will not need to worry about technology. It’s all taken care [of] for you. It can cost you from few hundreds to few thousands per months just to use the software however.”

• Encourage On-the-Job Learning

Who’s to say classroom training is the way to go? In certain business environments, employees are more likely to learn on the job. In fact, on-the-job learning has been proven to be more effective in industries where people are required to use their hands.

• Conduct Training Evaluations

Finally, make sure you’re conducting training evaluations after each training program is complete. This will allow you to glean firsthand insights about how effective your training is, where you can improve, and which areas should be replicated for future trainings.

Putting It Together

Employee training is a valuable resource for businesses, but it doesn’t have to be a money-suck. By approaching it from the right angle, you can tweak your current training program and turn it into a cost-effective, yet transformational resource for your business. Best of luck!