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Thursday, November 3, 2011

How to Provide Training on a Limited Budget

By Neil Jones

The recent global economic recession and the impending doom of another one round the corner have combined to make companies and firms very careful about managed training services . More specifically, the managed training services budget allocation restrictions have confounded many companies and firms in their efforts to give their employees proper training.

The problem of not having enough finances to hire the right training services is one that is very common in this current day and age, especially for small to medium scale companies. If you and your company are also facing similar problems then perhaps the following would be of help to you.

Evaluate the specific training needs: The main reason why the managed training services costs tend to rise for most companies is the lack of a proper analysis of the training needs. A good example of this would be a company that decides that its employees need customer service or IT training courses and just tie up with an external trainer or training program for customer services.

A generic customer service training program is bound to cost a lot more than, say, a client negotiation training program. The reason for this is that the former will consist of multiple modules while the latter is a small module. If your company was to delve deeper into the employees' specific training needs then it would be able to sanction the latter instead of the former and, hence, save money.

Assess various options available to you: In some conventional business circles, there is this belief that online training services are not very useful because of lack of personalized attention. This is a flawed perception because the world is moving away from manual to automation in every field including training and education.

This means that a certified and balanced online training program, while lacking in personal touch, would be much more efficient due to a wide variety of benefits. These benefits include minimal travel time, greater diffusion of resources, convenient planning options and, most importantly, consistent training routines.

Another very important consideration is whether your company can make do with just training a few employees for the training and then having them train the rest of the company's employees. This can be a wonderful way forward because it would not only save your company a lot of money but also double up as a team building exercise.

Make cost comparisons between different options: The age old concept of comparing multiple options is applicable even in the corporate setup. Your company should go through as many training service providers as possible before settling on any particular one.

While the comparison process is underway, there needs to be some special considerations such as the per employee costing, ability to split training packages and customizability of the training package.

The more creative you can be with your solutions the better it will be for your company. It is also worth mentioning that a managed training service is a completely separate field that needs to be understood before it can be manipulated to one's advantage.

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