How to Save Money on Training
If you take advice on how to save money on training, you’ll see the same suggestions over and over, about e-learning, making people take responsibility for their own training. I’m going to make some different ones for you…
1. Remember that, often, the point of training is to change behaviour. Anyone who tells you that this can be done by getting people to watch a computer for an hour either doesn’t understand people, or doesn’t understand training. Training companies love e-learning – they can write a product just once, and then sell it over and over without even being there!As business models go, it is excellent. As training goes, it can be useful for pure information transfer (if it is done well) or to initiate project based learning, but as for skills…
There’s an old joke about light bulbs : How many trainers does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, as long as they’re good enough to make the light bulb want to change…
Rule one : Be wary of wasting money on cheap alternatives. If you want to change behaviour with training, nothing succeeds like a trainer!
2. Training has to link to the business plan, and business plans often need people to change the way in which they work. Ever since the inception of IiP, many organisations seem to place an over-reliance on asking employees what training they would like instead of specifying learning needs.
You want behaviour to change, but people choose training they would like. People (generally) don’t like change. Do you see where this is heading?
Rule 2 : Don’t waste money on ineffective training – select training that will impact positively on people’s work. Choose a trainer who can enthuse people!
3. Training should be targeted at individuals, never spread universally across the whole organisation. If you’ve ever sat on a course you didn’t need (“But everyone’s got to go…”), you know what I’m talking about.
The wrong training is expensive : not just the cost of a course that someone doesn’t need, but the cost of their absence too.
Rule 3 : Don’t waste money on ‘sheep dipped’ training, that is without either an individual Learning Needs Analysis or a Corporate Gap Analysis.
4. If you’re (for example) rolling out a new process or starting a new initiative, and some form of briefing is needed, fail to personalise it at your peril. Memory retention is heavily influenced by a person’s perception of how the topic impacts on them.
(Keller discovered this : his ARCS model shows that Relevance is key to motivating people to learn.)
Rule 4 : It’s worth investing a little time and money in personalising your training events.
5. Get together with colleagues for training. Many organisations allow individual teams to arrange their own courses. Whilst I’m all for autonomy, that can lead to one or two members of each team going off to comparatively expensive public courses.
For example, two places on a two day public course can easily cost £1,800. If five teams have two people each to train, that’s £9,000! (An in house course could cost you as little as £2,000! And, of course, there’s no travel costs for your delegates…)
Rule 5 : Find out who needs training across the entire organisation and arrange for courses to be delivered at your site.