7 Ways to Reduce Staff Training Costs

Ongoing education for staff is important, but is cutting costs also a high priority right this year? Here are some cost effective tips for how to develop your staff while minimising training costs.

1. Assess and decide upon the most relevant and necessary training

Assess your current training materials with an eye to removing anything that is not relevant to your business and employees. Strategies to help you pinpoint and fine-tune the courses to retain and those to remove are:

• Conduct employee surveys and in-depth needs analyses to discover whether the current training is truly effective
• A quiz on completion of training is useful to find out what they have learned and whether each module has been successful.

2. Focus on the most beneficial training for each employee

Not every employee needs to attend every training session. Every member of staff should be an expert in their own position as well as the role they may grow into, but it is costly and irrelevant to train people in other areas just for the sake of diversity. Focus on the specific areas that will benefit your employees and what will benefit the company.

3. Use in-house experts for training

Does your company already have an employee who is an expert? Ask them to lead an informative session for other staff. This can be a great method of providing high-quality training whilst saving on external instructor fees. In-house experts are able to use relevant real-life examples from the business to demonstrate the direct application to the job. Furthermore, if somebody has a question after the training session, the expert is still around.

4. Cut unnecessary perks

Some training expenses may be necessary, such as time off work, food and travel for employees. However, you could save on some perks that really do not need to be included. Do you really need to hire a venue and provide an expensive lunch? Perhaps your own boardroom and some healthy finger food is all you really need. Trolleys are useful for moving equipment and serving refreshments.

5. Develop and use in-house training materials

In-house training materials provide additional reusable resources to your business and can reduce costs by lowering the amount of external training. If you hire external professionals to develop and provide training materials, they can provide valuable insights into your methods and practises. Make sure your subject matter experts review all information and get feedback from relevant staff and managers.

6. Online web-based training

Workers can attain many skills using web-based training and this can reduce or remove travel costs associated with traditional classroom training. Web-based training may be pre-packaged and available via computers, smartphones or tablets. Some businesses invest in video conferencing, webinar and web conferencing to enhance their online training.

7. e-Learning

A great way to minimise staff training costs is to use e-learning. Courses provide information in an informative way, using an array of delivery formats and multimedia tools to make training more engaging and interactive, often leading to better knowledge retention. E-Learning uses small lesson sections with checkpoints and tests along the way and staff can tackle courses in their own time.