Employers all around the world want a loyal and highly competent workforce. But an enviable team doesn’t appear from nowhere. It takes time, resources and funds to create the ‘dream team’. Most often hiring and training costs are involved.
Even though more employers now acknowledge the value of investing in employee training and development, some still see it as an unnecessary cost/luxury rather than an investment. It’s true that training is costly. But not training employees can prove to be far more expensive for your company.
Lack of Training Can Cost You an Employee
According to a 2019 report by LinkedIn, 94% of employees revealed that they would stay at a company only if it provided upskilling and career development opportunities. More than 52% of millennial and Gen Z workers (who constitute a substantial part of the workforce today) revealed opportunities for career progression is an important motivation for them in a 2021 survey conducted by PwC.
Employees are eager to stay ahead of the game. They also expect the company to invest in their career development on an individual basis. So they want more training opportunities than before.
Training Current Employees Is Cheaper Than Hiring New Ones
According to the Society of Human Resource Management, hiring new workers can be rather costly – not less than $4000 per new recruit. Training current employees can be relatively cheaper – just $1,111 per year.
Untrained Employees Can Be a Liability
Lack of training can affect the productivity of your workforce. If employees lack skills according to the demands of the industry, they will lag behind their peers leading to poor quality products, deterioration of customer service etc.
Moreover, if employees are not provided certain mandatory training like compliance training, your company can lose money due to several workplace accidents, data breaches etc. Companies lose an average of $14.82 million dollars per year from legal disputes arising from non-compliance.
How To Conduct Training With A Limited Budget?
What if training budget is genuinely limited and you cannot afford to invest a lot in upskilling employees?
The answer is – don’t neglect training. Make it more strategic. You can provide training to those who need it on an urgent basis. Conduct a basic performance review to identify skill gaps. Read below to find out other ways to carry out budget employee training.
Leverage Online Content
Budget employee training is all about cutting unnecessary costs. You don’t have to come up with new content all the time. Store your content in an LMS (Learning Management System) and reuse or repurpose it as and when needed.
For example you can have a video presentation of company policies for new hires and provide the same through PDFs. Unless you plan on providing training on a specific niche or in a subject that requires specialized knowledge, rely on pre-built courses for training employees.
Keep It Remote As Much As Possible
Remote/virtual classes are a must when it comes to budget employee training. It paperless for starters. This means you save a lot of money on that front. Secondly, if classes are conducted online you don’t have to spend funds to cover travel expenses of instructors or book classrooms.
Arrange Mentoring Programs
Who said you have to depend on outsourced subject matter experts/instructors all the time? You can introduce mentorship programs where a senior employee will temporarily take on the responsibility of training a new recruit.
The senior will provide basic on the job training and inform the basics of organization culture to new team members.
Mentorship programs yields two benefits – new hires will have access to vital information without any extra cost and they will be able to align themselves with your organization easily. You get budget employee training and an extensive on-boarding process in one!
Rely on Micro learning
Long-form educational content costs more. This leads to an inflated employee training budget. Moreover it may lead to lack of engagement as most employees will get bored of endless videos and long PDFs. Invest in micro-modules (6-8 minutes max) where the student will be provided briefs and summaries. Micro-modules are great when information is needed on an urgent basis and in-depth knowledge is not required.
Encourage peer/social learning
Do you have an employee that can work magic with PowerPoint presentations? In that case you can request them to hold a small workshop on PPT skills for their co-workers. If you have an LMS you can integrate it with social media so that employees can share PDFs, videos and training material with each other. This is a great way to facilitate community building and provide budget employee training.
Invest in a Quality LMS
An LMS can help you meet your goal of providing budget employee training as offer the following benefits:
• Instructors can upload course content on the cloud. Employees can log in any time and access course content.
• You will save on transportation costs. Offline classes involve costs such as instructor travel expenses, booking a venue for a workshop/seminar etc.
• The LMS can keep you updated on essential information such as course completion rates, time taken on each course etc through automated reports.
Encourage Employees to Take-Charge Of Their Own Learning
Not all courses will require an instructor or an SME (subject matter expert). You can suggest your employees to learn new skills or acquire new knowledge by attending a podcast, reading a PDF or watching a video. Self-learning empowers an employee as they are in charge of their own upskilling. It’s also a popular form of budget employee training. Provide a time frame and ask your team members to complete a course on their own within that time frame.