Many organisations understand the importance of corporate training for both people and businesses, and provide learning opportunities to their employees. However, despite ever-evolving eLearning technologies, some companies still believe that the best way to develop a team is through traditional instructor-led training. This method definitely works, but eLearning is far more progressive, since it allows you to train your team faster and cheaper without any loss in teaching quality and even allows you to achieve higher quality.
Did we say cheaper? Yes, that’s right. Even if traditional training seems less costly in the short term, it requires ongoing expenses that will turn into large sums of money over time. Here are three things you can save on if you opt for eLearning:
On-site trainers
You don’t need to hire an on-site instructor and worry about instructor fees, although you might need to hire a professional to create an online course. But in this case, it will be a one-time cost. Once you have it ready, you can reuse the course as many times as needed with any number of employees.
And you don’t have to worry about on-site instructor fees.
Travel and accommodation
Since all the training materials are available for learners online, they can view them wherever they wish, and from anywhere in the world. There’s no need to gather all your staff in one place and spend a fortune renting hotel rooms and covering travel expenses. This is especially great for global organisations with dispersed teams.
Printing
With content hosted online, you can also cut down on printing costs. Job aids, workbooks, and handouts don’t need to be printed for each training session. You can easily distribute all these materials to your employees in digital format. They can store the content on their computer or mobile device and refer to it whenever they need to. As well as financial savings, eLearning can help a business become “greener” and reduce paper waste.
And there’s more…
We’ve covered some obvious costs that you can forget about after you launch eLearning in your company. But there are also some indirect costs that employers have to pay when using traditional methods of corporate training.
Lost production time
Every time your employees attend face-to-face training sessions, they lose time from their daily workload. Have you ever calculated the actual loss in terms of money? If so, you might have been unpleasantly surprised. And eLearning allows employees to access training during the pockets of free time they have.
New hire onboarding
With an average turnover rate of 44.3%, it’s extremely expensive for companies to train each new hire individually. eLearning can help reduce these costs dramatically. You don’t need to create a new training program each time or assign a mentor to each newcomer, but just need to create an onboarding course once and deliver it to all your new hires.
Business scalability
This point is somehow connected with the previous one. A growing business is one that is typically expanding not only in revenue and profits but in the number of its team members as well. By using eLearning technologies, you can train even a hundred employees in a single day with a single piece of content.
Faster employee development
Face-to-face training can be quite slow because it depends on the instructor’s schedule and is typically conducted during working hours. As for online courses, a trainee can take them anytime, anywhere, and with any device: in a café during their lunch break, while in line at a bank, or even in bed before going to sleep. Everyone has their own learning schedule that is not dependent on anyone else. They learn when they have free time, when their energy level is maximised for retention, and, lastly, when they want to. All this helps them develop much faster than if they were to study the same material face to face during occasional scheduled training sessions.
Final thoughts
All in all, the long-term cost of face-to-face training, especially for large companies, outweigh the initial investments of implementing eLearning. If you’re considering launching online training in your organisation but doubt whether it will save your company money, you need to estimate your future eLearning investments. The expense sheets should include the cost of eLearning software, salary for your team, and investments in content development. Once the calculations are done, compare the cost of eLearning to how much you are already spending on instructor-led training. You might very well realise that you’ll be able to save money in the long term by incorporating eLearning.
