If you are planning your training program strategy, you know that you need to do the numbers before you can justify that it will be good for the company. Cost is always a big deal in the corporate world. Before you can proceed with a project, you have to do more than prove that it will profitable for the company. You also have to provide the management with the figures to show them the cost to put the project in motion. That is how you get projects approved by the management. The general rule is, the less it will cost to make a project and the more profitable it can be, the better chances of getting an approval.
There is no question about it, training will always be an important part in improving the knowledge and skills of the workers in the company. But coming up with new materials to teach is not your only challenge. A greater challenge lies in how you can improve the program without raising the cost to create a course. Better yet, how can you create a training course that will cost less than what it did in the past?
Good news is, creating an online course will allow you to lower your cost to train the workers in the company. The key is to utilize cloud-based technology.
Cloud-based is simply a term that refers to information that you will store in the Internet. If you know how to utilize it properly, you can actually cut your costs by up to 60%. A cloud-based training program means you will be hiring a Learning Management System service provider instead of handling everything yourself. Putting your training in the cloud can help you cut back on your costs because of two important reasons.
It costs less in terms of setting up.
If you will set up the training in-house – you have to spend time on it. Instead of using your time to work on your core competencies, you have to use it to set up the place and materials needed to train employees. But if you hire an LMS provider to do the job, everything will be easier. You can immediately work on creating the course instead of wasting time in the set up. That is because the service provider will come to you with the basic setup already in place. For instance, you do not have to invest in a server and its maintenance because the provider already has this. The capital expenses will all be taken cared of. You just have to worry about personalizing your elearning materials. You do not have to hire IT professionals to set up the technicalities too. The provider has a team already hired and in their payroll to do that for you.
It costs less in terms of travel and lodging.
If you will set up a traditional classroom for the trainees and they will be coming from branches all over the country, you have to think about how you will bring everyone together. That means you have to spend on travel and lodging costs. If you do your training via the Internet, everyone can stay in their own place and use their own resources and still be trained. You do not have to spend additional costs. It will also save them time because they do not have to waste it as they travel to the training site. They can attend a course and immediately go back to their daily tasks. It is a very productive way to train because you do not have to sacrifice much in terms of time and traveling costs.
Apart from the cost, there are other reasons why training programs in the cloud are beneficial if compared to the traditional classroom setup. For one, instructors will find it easier to monitor everyone. In a classroom setting, instructors can only look at one student at a time. Online, the learners can be placed in thumbnails so the instructor can see all of them on the screen at once. All it takes is a click of a button to go to the trainee that requires personal assistance.
These reasons paint a great picture for training in the cloud. But although that is true, you should consider carefully your goals and objectives to determine if you should use cloud-based technologies. Do not force it if you know that face to face training is more effective to train your workers than doing it in the cloud.
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