7 Ways to Save Money on Training

Blended learning, when it is well integrated and well organised, can be a great money saver! That doesn’t mean to say that blended learning in ONLY about saving money but it’s a great start! In the current crisis, we have seen all sorts of dramatic events but, for once, it seems that training hasn’t suffered the usual swingeing cuts.

In the past, the reaction was immediately ‘times are hard so we have to cut out training‘; it was the first thing to go but this time round, it seems that training departments have been ‘saved’ and are being encouraged to be more creative in how they spend their funds. It’s a positive spin on the situation as it has thrown up the effective use of some great training tools!

7 ways to Save Money on Training

1. Stop running face-to-face courses and immediately save 40% of your training budget traditionally spent on flights, food, hotels and away-from-home allowances
2. Set up webinars when you have something new to communicate to your workforce, wherever they are. They can be delivered in real time or by download to the manager’s desk
3. Don’t send out a fleet of trainers all over the world to deliver your new management development programme. Use a blend of online learning, self study and teleconference to get the same results
4. Cut down on face-to-face courses where managers come to you at your training centre and find another way to deliver the bulk of the training (webinars? e-learning?)
5. Make a series of short webinars on key management skills and make these available over your intranet. Managers can download and watch these when they have half an hour to spare
6. Don’t recall your sales force every time there is a product update; send out the details to their blackberry or iPhone
7. If you have to use hotels to deliver your training, negotiate the rates really hard and get discounts. They can’t argue much at the moment with occupancy rates low

You can probably think of a lot of other ways to save. Your objective needs to be to manage as closely as possible the resources you have and find ways to deliver more with less; it really is time to go for ‘more bang for your buck’!

Kate Cobb is Director of blended learning zone. She was commissioned to write “Blended Learning” for the CIPD L&D Journal in 2008 and is a published author of training books and manuals. She provides a range of services for HR and L&D managers in design and delivery, consultancy and strategic planning of blended learning solutions.

Kate has over 25 years experience as a management training consultant providing F2F training, executive coaching and instructional design services for a wide variety of clients in UK, Europe and the Middle East in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors.

Download Kate’s white paper “Blended Learning – the Way Forward?” and receive a 2010 Survey of Blended Learning http://www.blendedlearningzone.com/index.html