The age of startups has opened the doors of many opportunities for small businesses. At the same time, with various resources becoming more accessible, startups are expected to match the benefits that are provided by the big players.
In the race to attract the best talent, startups must comply.
One such benefit that startups are increasingly investing into, is employee training.
With that said, not every business has the spending power to offer their employees state-of-the-art training backed by expensive infrastructure.
Hence, bootstrapped businesses must find ways to reduce employee training costs, while making sure they don’t compromise on the quality of the training experience.
If that sounds familiar, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will discuss the practical ways that startups can employ to reduce the cost associated with effective employee training:
Taking The Digital Approach
While eLearning was once a way for companies to cut down costs, it has quickly become the norm because of the recent pandemic. If you haven’t yet switched to eLearning for your employee training needs, you won’t get a better opportunity.
Even when things go back to normal, the benefits of eLearning will remain unchanged.
Lower infrastructure costs, less time to get the training ball rolling, and availability of creative approaches and technologies to make training more engaging are just a few of the benefits of online training, that you will continue to experience long after society has recovered from the current situation.
Outsourcing Custom Content Development
Custom content is one of the best ways to ensure your training initiatives are aligned with your short and long term business goals. However, the biggest challenge associated with developing custom content is the investment of time and money that is associated with it.
One of the best ways to work around this challenge is to outsource the development of e-learning content. Sure, this does not mean that your custom training content will suddenly cost half the price, but you can be almost sure that it will cost much less than allocating your in house resources to the development process.
Not to forget, there are several other advantages associated with outsourcing training content development. A couple of these are access to world-class instructional design talent and quicker turnaround times.
Lean Training Approach
By lean training approach, we mean analyzing your current training initiatives and finding opportunities to eliminate unnecessary modules and reuse and recycle existing training material.
For instance, if you are providing compliance training sessions, there may be some information within your courses that your experienced employees may already be aware about. These chunks of information can be included as part of other, more important training sessions. This way, you can reduce the time it takes for an employee to complete their training, and join the frontlines.
Similarly, there may be certain video lessons that can be used as part of training for different departments. Identify them and you can reduce training costs by reusing such content assets.
Turning Leaders Into Trainers
Instructor-led sessions are a big part of providing an engaging training experience to learners. With that said, hiring instructors can turn out to be a pricey undertaking.
The strain of this cost can be reduced by identifying potential trainers within your teams. More often than not, these people will emerge out of top positions within your company.
While replacing instructors altogether may not be possible, this strategy can help you significantly optimize your costs by reducing the total number of training sessions that require you to hire external trainers.
Not to forget, training sessions led by people that have practical knowledge of things they are teaching daily, can help you provide your learners with more insightful and practical training sessions.
Conclusion
There you have it, practical ways to reduce your employee training costs without sacrificing quality. Have you used any tricks to reduce the training costs that we haven’t mentioned in this article?
Share them with the community in the comment section below.
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