Its Time to Reduce Your Training Cost - Tips from the WEB

We wish to make references to the following bodies on providing us with good research materials.
- Bersin and Bersin Associates
-Training Zone
-Suite101
-EgyptHR


Today's Training Departments and Learning and Development Departments face a big challenge.  Here is the question which is always posted by Top Management:  How much of training costs have you saved from the budget given to you?

We wish to provide you with 9 recommendations to consider:

1.Build a spending model for training
(includes leadership development, career development, LMS, training technology).  Such a move can save 10-15% of your training spent. Eg. of Models can be from Kirk Patrick's Four Level Training Model,

2. Rationalize external spending. 
Centralize vendor operations and you can see a 20-30% extra spending in many training programs. 

3. Rely heavily on informal and collaborative learning.
Least expensive ways are onboarding, supervisory development and many coaching mentoring approaches.

4. Be Creative
Have Lunch Talks, Video Training.

5. Visible Cost
a.Partner with other organizations to share costs
b.Reduce trainee travel and eliminate facility costs by using self places, reduce number and lenght of handouts, reuse laminations and retain promotional materials
c. Salary and Benefits: Train current staff to be part time trainers, use contract trainers for non recurring projects.

6. Hidden Cost
Reduce training time using task analyses to isolate and train only critical knowledge and skills.
eg for a 2 days workshop you can simplify to 1 day and have another day in a month for 2 hours on assessment and going through case studies.

7. Overproduction
Why do we send people to a 2 days course if they only need 10% of the content of this course?
eg. a course in "Advance Excel" is needed.  However your employee only needs to know how to create and use a pivot table. There are good tools online which is free.  Hence before you receive a request you can ask your requestor:  which specific module in excel should you want training on?

8. Inappropriate processing
Make request fir training as easy as possible.  Dont use 24 step procedures with approvals by team leaders, manager, hr, vp, ceo.  Believe that if people really need training they really need this for their job. They wont enroll for a training they dont need.  So make it easy.

9. Unnecessary Inventory/ Motion:
a.We have seen that some companies have so many training programs on their LMS but an employee can never find what they wanted because it is so complicated.  Therefore make clear overview of trainings you provide, easy searchable and frequently updated.

b.Make sure training facilities are nice.  Dont put people in a back room without daylight.


Regards,
The Learning MatchMaker
Research Team