As more and more businesses realise the importance of training, L&D executives are now presented with the task of providing employee training that drives a positive ROI, while keeping the costs in control.
However, more often than not, you get what you pay for and ensuring effective training for employees at a low cost can be quite a bit of a challenge.
One of the go-to ways of bringing down the cost of any business function is outsourcing. However, in the case of training development, lower costs is not the only advantage associated with working with corporate training companies.
Here are some of the others:
Developing training content, especially for elearning needs, is a time consuming and resource intensive process. Even for developing a 5-hour course, it can take well over 3 weeks of dedicated man-hours.
This poses multiple problems. For starters, not all businesses have that kind of time to spend on training material development. Then there is also the problem of taking existing resources off their day to day tasks and dedicating them to this one, which is bound to have some negative effect on your business’ operations.
By outsourcing content development, you free up your in house resources to focus on their core tasks. At the same time, you will be able to set and meet tight deadlines when you work with an expert that has multiple resources to allocate to your task.
You may have the best knowledge of your business functions and/or products. However, presenting that knowledge in a format that others can learn from, requires a whole different set of skills.
Expert instructional designers employed by corporate training companies are rigorously trained in understanding and applying the adult learning theory. These guys understand how we, as humans, learn, and are able to apply that knowledge to course material that is easy to understand, consume, and remember.
The only alternative to outsourcing instructional design is to hire an in-house instructional designer. However, it is not difficult to imagine how that can be an expensive mistake. Once your course material is developed, your resource will have to be reallocated to make sure their cost is recovered.
Drawing from the previous point, many businesses’ arsenal of subject matter experts is only limited to their core business activities. However, the need of training stretches beyond this. From IT training to soft skills training, there are several training scenarios whose expertise may be lacking from your in house team.
This challenge is eliminated when you work with an outsourcing partner as it becomes their responsibility to find and enlist the help of the right experts for your training content needs.
Not being aware of these advantages, many business owners and learning administrators argue that developing employee training in-house is more efficient as the in-house expertise, relevant to the training material, is not available with an outsourcing partner.
However, in the age of collaboration, this isn’t truly a challenge. If you think your team is in possession of a resource that has unmatched expertise over a subject, you can easily arrange for them to collaborate with your outsourcing partners. This way, you can ensure your training material contains the knowledge and wisdom of your in house subject matter expert, and is presented in a manner that aids easy understanding for your learners/employees.