How Technologies Help Lower the Cost of Corporate Training
It’s no secret that corporate training is one of the vital factors that affect business success. It allows you to onboard and upskill your employees, fix issues within teams, make the workplace safer, etc. Yet, traditional corporate training can be pretty expensive, especially for organizations with offices in different cities and countries. Fortunately, modern technologies – employee training tools in particular – help you reduce the cost of corporate training while making it more effective. Let’s see how:
No Travel Expenses
Traveling costs are one of the largest expenses of traditional corporate training. Companies have to pay for plane tickets, hotel rooms, travel allowance – everything needed to get a trainer from one department to another. Apart from the high cost, companies have to put up with the slowness of the entire training process: employees have to wait till the instructor visits their department on their route. Needless to say, trainers get tired of living out of a suitcase and sometimes fail to conduct productive in-person training sessions.
With eLearning technologies, you can forget about all of this. Training programs can be delivered as online courses, webinars, quizzes, or other online content that trainees can access from anywhere. You do need to pay for online training software, but their costs are nothing compared to travel expenses.
For example, it costs a British company around £373/day to have its trainer on a business trip to Paris [1]. Flight or train tickets aren’t included in this value. Now, a learning management system (LMS) and an authoring tool – the two software tools you need for online corporate training – cost a company with 300 trainees around £8,000/year or 21 business trip days. As you can see, eLearning technologies can save you the cost of 11 months’ worth of travel expenses. Even more, if you include ticket costs.
No Equipment and Materials
When you provide training face to face, you don’t just walk and sit together, diving into the essence of acting like ancient philosophers. You need much more than this: a projector to demonstrate your presentation, brochures, notebooks, pens, and pencils – lots of stuff that you need to pay for.
In online corporate training, you also need equipment: smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Fortunately, trainees already have this equipment, so you don’t need to pay for it.
The online format also reduces the cost of developing corporate training. Of course, you need to create training materials too. But unlike brochures, they are not material by nature – they’re all digital. This means you don’t have to print and transport them. Neither must you reprint them when they get in poor condition or when the information becomes outdated. You can update your training courses in a few clicks, and trainees from any part of the world will have relevant training materials right away.
No Classroom Expenses
Another potential expense of traditional corporate training is rent and other venue fees like electricity and heat. Now, when many companies have moved their work online, they may not have an office room for training. So, they need to rent one for a session and gather the entire team, making them spend extra time on transport and cancelling any plans they might have had that day.
With online training technologies, your ‘classroom’ is always with you. And the company doesn’t pay a penny for it. Employees can take courses in their living room, on their way home, in a park, or anywhere else at a time that’s most convenient for them.
Increased Effectiveness
The previous factors reduce the cost of corporate training directly, so you can easily calculate the resources you can save if you move your training online. But there’s one more way online corporate training proves itself to be more beneficial for business – it’s more effective and engaging.
Think of training as an investment aimed at a higher profit for the company. Traditional training requires a lot of resources, both financial and mental. And the results are not always satisfying. Some employees find training programs dull, irrelevant, and too formal. They can just sit through classes, then come back to work and perform the same way they’re used to. A business is unlikely to get a higher profit in such circumstances. That’s why such training is a poor investment.
With online training, you invest less and receive more. The online format fits the modern world better: employees can interact with training materials, watch them like YouTube videos, take learning paths tailored to the specifics of their position, compete with each other (if your LMS has gamification features), and more. Training specialists can monitor trainee progress and see how well a person knows a particular topic, what they need to work on, what position would help them reveal their strengths, etc.
In the long run, online training leads a company to better job performance and higher profit. This factor might not precisely reduce the cost of online training per se, but it probably counts because a company’s profits grow while the online training costs remain the same over time.
Summing Up
As you can see, technologies reduce the cost of corporate training in many ways, from eliminating travel and venue expenses to boosting the company’s income. Apart from the financial benefits, online corporate training also increases employee engagement and knowledge retention, resulting in higher productivity and better performance.
