How to reduce employee training costs without sacrificing quality

Audrey Lamp underlines the versatility of online training.

Every business owner has a grand goal in mind – to make the team as effective as possible. This is why everyone strives to hire the best talent and trains their employees to achieve better performance. An unqualified and poorly trained employee might work well with minor tasks at the beginning, but sooner or later, they will need a push from their employer. 

Businesses learn on a daily basis and with this, the principles and ways of work change. That being said, employees need to be given opportunities to expand their expertise and knowledge to do their job better.

“Training is a necessity and everyone knows it. You can try to avoid it or go around it, but all this will do is damage your business” says Brandon York, HR manager at edugeeksclub.com.

Knowing this does not make training less of an investment because at its core, quality training is a huge expense. It requires plenty of time, planning and resources, all of which make businesses spend more money than they planned in the first place. 

By combining virtual technology and learning, you can make training much more enjoyable for your employees. 

But, what if I told you that training should not be that expensive, and quality does not have to suffer if you do it right. To avoid overspending on employee training, here are some cost-reduction strategies to consider. 

Choose online training

The first and most cost-effective solution for high training expenses is online training. Quality in elearning remains high, while the costs are extremely reduced. This doesn’t just apply to students who take online classes or courses, but also to employees who need to master new skills and tools for their work. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do to make this happen. Here are some ideas of how to include online training:

Incorporate forums

Forums are an excellent tool for convenient and free peer-to-peer communication and learning. Instead of spending a fortune on events, catering, and venues to join your team together, create forums where they can communicate whenever they wish to.

This is a great tool for learning, but also for maintaining good professional relationships, which is key to the good functioning of the organisation.

Find the right learning management system

The LMS should meet the training needs and if done right, you can structure it in a way that fits all modules, lessons and courses in an organised manner. It is also a great tool for tracking the performance of your employees, making it a win-win situation. 

Make webinars and instructional videos

You should not even attempt to skip videos as part of training these days. These are the most popular method for training nowadays, and an excellent way to share your thoughts and instructions while saving costs. 

And if these are not enough, you can proceed to making live workshops and webinars. By doing these, you remove the need for travel, catering, and venue expenses, therefore lowering the high training costs per employee.

Leverage internal resources

What does this mean, really? It means that instead of using outsourced expertise and skills, you can leverage people inside your business to train those who know less. This helps you cut down on those heavy expenses for hiring professional trainers and paying them to come and teach your team.

Naturally, you won’t have trainers and experts just waiting for you to give them another task or obligation, but if you find the right experienced staff to train other employees and award them for it, the expenses will be much lower. 

The task here is to find the most knowledgeable, experienced people in the team and ask them to train the others. This probably won’t eliminate the need of formal training, but it can definitely reduce the need of it. 

Exchange your training resources with other companies

Establishing a good relationship with the competition is essential for the success of a company. If you are a good entrepreneur, you probably have several friends in the field and lucky for you, this is one of the benefits that come with it. 



As long as you don’t share the strategies you use to do your work, you can work together with other companies by sharing existing courses, tests, and lectures. These should help both sides gain cost benefits and make the training cheaper, yet maintain its high quality. 

Insert training in virtual gamification

By combining virtual technology and learning, you can make training much more enjoyable for your employees. This also comes with the benefit of reducing costs to the minimum, since even the prizes for good work done in virtual gamification will be virtual. 

Use tools for reporting

To be able to really train the employees, you need to see what training works best. So, if you decided to use an LMS, what you need now are reporting tools to track the following:

  • Engagement – what courses, lessons and modules are most used?
  • Retention – are learners motivated and dedicated enough to move from one module to another or not?
  • Performance – how well has the training worked?

Thankfully, almost every LMS software has at least some reporting feature, so what you are looking for is a feature that fits your company’s needs. 

Recycle and reuse

By recycling the courses that haven’t performed well or fit the requirements of your employees, you’d be reducing the learning material and with it, the expenses. Some parts can be reused and rearranged, while others need to go directly into the trash. Whichever you decide to use, such actions will make training not only cheaper, but also more effective. 

Bottom line

Instead of just rushing into cutting down the costs for training, entrepreneurs need to work on keeping the quality of such training. This is a priority and the only way to stay on top of the competition. Still, training costs can be reduced without making the quality suffer, and these six tips should help you do both. 

 

About the author

Audrey Lamp is a freelance journalist.

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