Organisations can cut up to 30% of their training costs by addressing four areas of inefficiency, according to a White Paper by KnowledgePool.
The paper highlights supplier management, administration, scheduling and solution design as four areas where organisations can make significant savings.
By improving supplier management, the firm claims up to 7% can be saved, while using specialist technology to automate the booking, authorisation and post-course evaluation of training can cut administration costs by about 30%, equating to a 7.5% reduction in the overall cost of learning.
The paper suggests that organisations can save 2.6% of their learning budget by improving the occupancy of internal training events and ensuring that events with low take-up get cancelled before penalty charges are incurred and 9.5% can be saved by introducing longer-term planning and by restricting the ad hoc scheduling of training by individual managers.
A further 9.5% saving can be made by redesigning their learning solutions.
It recommends that the relevance and effectiveness of training interventions should be reviewed every two years, as the needs of the business will change, and it highlights, for example, that classroom-based courses can be redesigned and delivered using different approaches such as blended learning.
Kevin Lovell, learning strategy director at KnowledgePool, noted many organisations were looking to reduce their training spend by 20% to 30%, and argued such a reduction was realistic only if firms look at the efficiency and effectiveness of their training operations.
He said: “The obvious place to look, when making learning budget cuts, is external supplier costs but greater reductions are possible through intelligent scheduling and solution design. A 30% cut in learning costs might sound extreme, but it is achievable.”
The White Paper lists some additional savings which can be achieved by outsourcing the organisation and management of learning to a specialist, vendor-independent provider.
Lovell said: “Vendor-independent managed learning providers can gain better discounts from external suppliers because they have greater purchasing power.
“They also have the systems, processes and people in place to achieve greater efficiencies in areas such as administration and scheduling.” n
