This can be achieved by taking a tailored approach to prioritizing the training expenses most critical for your learning needs. These expenses can be considered in terms of your media, interactivity, technology, and training team requirements. This is where choosing the best LMS becomes an important decision.
But looking out for those sneaky hidden training costs, like maintenance, course revision, and time, is also important for keeping your training expenses within budget. Because planning ahead is much easier than dealing with surprise expenses later on. Don’t forget that these costs, along with direct costs, can differ between online and offline modes of delivery.
So you need to choose what works best for you with the resources you have available.
Employing techniques like the backward design (if you’re designing a new course), or repurposing existing materials (if you’re optimizing a current course) can help you to reduce training costs in the design and development phase. Then, simple tricks like creating assessments with automated feedback and providing mobile accessibility will save valuable time during the training program. Lost time is a cost, after all.
But what really matters is that when training costs go down, return on training investment goes up. And this means more value for your buck. You can measure ROI with a few simple indicators, like learner engagement, knowledge acquisition or application of skills, and profit – depending on what’s most important to you. And by placing more value on the indicators that matter most to your objectives, you can customize your ROI score to your definition of training success.
But, as Anton Chekhov says, “ Learning is of no value until you put it into practice”.
So we challenge you to start practicing some of the cost reduction strategies you’ve learned in this book. And discover that it is doable to create an effective online training program within a reasonable budget.