According to Training Magazine, U.S. companies spent $70.6 billion on training products and services in 2015. That’s a chunk of change. But even if you have a hefty training budget, it makes sense to spend it wisely. (Maybe you’ll have enough left over to hire Van Halen for the holiday party.)
And if money’s already tight, you’ll be looking for ways to keep your training quality high and your costs low. Here are a few big ideas with tiny price tags:
Encourage mentoring.
Yaov Vilner, co-founder of Ranky, suggests developing a mentor program to help new folks learn about key skills and company culture. The folks at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School concur in a recent post, noting that peer mentoring can help middle managers develop their abilities.
Mentoring engagements can focus on a single skill for a short period or help mentees advance their careers over several months. Many experienced people enjoying mentoring others. And it costs comparatively little to manage a program.
Use stretch assignments.
Along with mentoring and coaching, managers can hand out stretch assignments, tasks that require an employee to learn on the job. It could involve more responsibility in their current job role or even a completely new role.
Those taking on stretch assignments will need support from a manager or coach to help them overcome new challenges. But the results can be even better than a training course because these tasks provide real-world experience.
Not only does it cost little to incorporate stretch tasks, you also haven’t pulled someone away from work to take a class. So your opportunity costs drop as well.
Grow your own content.
It’s expensive to create classes. In fact, ATD research suggests that one hour of a traditional class takes between 43 to 89 person hours to produce. More complex offerings can take up to 700 hours to create one hour of instruction. You can buy pre-built courses, but they won’t address your company’s unique needs.
So maybe user-generated content, where employees create training materials for others, offers a good solution. Gartner predicts that by 2018, more than 80% of organizations will include user-generated content in their training to some degree (as reported on Softwareadvice.com).
Employees can quickly create informal videos, wiki articles or slide presentations on focused topics and make them available for others to learn from. The content is customized for your company’s needs and costs little to produce. You might even have some lying around right now.
The challenge comes in curating and organizing the material into coherent subjects, keeping material up-to-date, and making it easy to find when needed. However, you have to do all this for professionally created courses as well.
Bust the bells.
Technology lures us in with elaborate bells and whistles, but we pay for these decorations, and it’s not always clear what we get for it. If you’re looking at learning systems or apps, make sure the fancy features make a difference in how effective your training will be.
And ask yourself whether the technology is really necessary or just cool. The U.S. Navy runs an extensive on-the-job training program with pen and paper. It’s not the easiest process to manage, but in terms of helping people learn and apply new information, the latest, feature-stuffed software may not work any better.
Cheat.
In a 2011 report in Science, researchers suggest our ability to Google whatever we need whenever we need it has weakened our recall of facts. Whether it’s true or not, we’re all used to looking up information throughout the day.
So your employees may do better by having resources available to refer to on the job than taking training and trying to remember what they learn. This “performance support” can work for procedures, dates, contact information, and other facts. If you’re spending training money on getting people to memorize information, consider just letting them cheat – like we all do anyway.
When spending, think people, not products.
If you value learning, and you want to help employees develop, you can’t avoid spending some money on it. But when you’re deciding what to do, focus more on people than products.
Whether you give managers more time for coaching or offer bonuses for employees who mentor others, keeping your team as the centerpiece of training will more likely result in improved behavior, better learning habits, and a stronger network than you’ll get from a new product. After all, training is about investing in your people.
I consulted for organizations that don’t have formal training programs. Instead they hire those with certifications, certs, and expect their hires to keep current with their certs. The challenge is that these certs tend to be very specialized. This trend in cert specialization conditions organizations and the hires towards “hyper-specialization”, where a job or position traditionally done by one person is done by multiple people.
For instance, to change an organization two decades ago it was typical to bring in a management consultant to do change management, project management, and analysis/advisory at different times during their engagement. Today each activity is typically done by a specialist with a cert in the related discipline.
When doing small things, relying only on external training and certs works well. But on a large scale the cost is high, really high.
I think both. The training officer, with the power and responsibility to pass or fail the trainee, puts a real importance on the training effort. Thus it isn’t just an eye wash or process of minimal importance. The end result is only the best of the trainees make it to full officer-ship with a car and zone.
Thanks, Ken!!
Carol: One of the best training tools I’ve used is the mentoring of new employees or employees being groomed for promotion. This process is used by many law enforcement agencies. A typical program takes a trainee after 6 months in “boot camp” and puts them with one of their best officers for 30 days. Then with another officer for 30 days. then under close supervision of a third officer for the next month. The training officers are paid a modest premium, so costs are not high.
The key to the programs success may lie in the fact that any of the three training officers can wash the trainee out if they feel the trainee will not fit into the culture of the force, or has a bad attitude, or is seriously deficient in any other way.
Hi Ken,
Thanks for a great example of mentoring success. I hadn’t heard of a program in which the mentor could wash out the mentee, but that’s a terrific point. Do you think it helps keeps the mentors engaged or just ensures that the result of the program is a quality officer? Or both?
thanks!!