Outsourcing Training Creation or Outsourcing Training Delivery
The outsourcing the creating of training will require you to request more billable hours as training requests or staff numbers increase. On the other hand, the latter (when purchased on a subscription basis) does not have price changes associated with the number of staff or training sessions scheduled. This makes the latter form of outsourcing scalable and sustainable. In this blog, we will explore why and when to outsource training, how outsourcing can support your company to scale and when outsourcing can be sustainable.
Why outsource your training?
In an ideal world, all training would be in-house training. However, in the real world, the cost of training in-house is just not an option with current staff costs and current budget cuts for training in most companies.
Besides budgets, another reason to outsource training is when you don’t have employees skilled or qualified to deliver specific training sessions. For example, you may need health and safety training but no qualified health and safety specialist. In this situation, you would hire an external team or outsource to a training company.
Additionally, even if you do have skilled trainers and the budget you need to ensure that your staff also have the time to dedicate to training. This includes both training other staff on the job and creating training packages that can be repetitively used across the company and in the future.
If you don’t have these three (budget, skilled trainers and time) then it is best to outsource. We know that outsourcing is not always an easy choice. Here at Corporate Training Solutions Australia (CTSA), we have designed Training as a Service (TaaS) to offer you the quality training that you would otherwise deliver in house, at the fraction of the cost.
In our blogs, we provide tips on how you can transition to TaaS. For example, we recommend before subscribing to TaaS that you conduct a needs analysis of what training will be beneficial for your staff. You can then ensure you make the most use of the subscription and are providing the right development opportunities for your staff. Read the full blog here.
If you are diligent with following this process of preparing needs analysis, subscribing to TaaS, enrolling the right staff into the right training at the right time, then outsourcing your training can be a very successful process.
How outsourcing helps you to scale your training and development?
Regardless of whether you outsource or deliver in-house training, it is important to seek opportunities to scale your training and development efforts. In other words, you must be looking for ways to scale the training your team provides the company so that you can enable business growth while maintaining a cost-effective strategy. If not, as the company grows so too will your training team and budget require reciprocal growth. This is not always something that is planned when making new hires nor is it always a priority for the company budget.
How can you find opportunities to scale within your team?
Firstly, review what training you can design and develop once that can be used repetitively. For example, all staff need to go through onboarding as they start with the company. You may find that your company hires multiple staff to start on the same day so that onboarding training can be delivered to multiple new staff at the same time. This is one step in the right direction. As the workload increases for the learning and development team, opportunities to scale have been identified and resolved by creating “onboarding days”.
However, what if some of that training was delivered through eLearning? Of course, you want to make a great impact on the first several days of a new hire working with the company. Sitting them in front of the computer all day is not a nice welcome. This is why we refer to some of the training being delivered through eLearning. This will break up the days for the new employees and most importantly, be cost-effective for the learning and development team.
Design training once and deliver it repetitively. That is scaling.
However, apart from the onboarding training example above, internal training may be ad-hoc and need to be adapted with each new delivery request. This can make it difficult for a company to scale their internal training and development. Each time you have a new request for training, your team needs to analyse the need, design the content and deliver the training.
It is possible that in the future when the same need appears, the training can easily be delivered without the need for analysing or designing. However, there is still work required from the learning and development team that does not make it possible to scale your training.
This workload equals time and budget. Therefore, you want to find opportunities to scale as much as possible so that you can save time and budget without jeopardising the quality of training.
How can outsourcing help you to scale?
At CTSA, each month our scheduled training will go ahead regardless of whether your staff are enrolled. That is part of Training as a Service, all training will be delivered. This way, you can leverage the training that we have organised and delivered, and enrol your staff, without the risk of wasting your time or budget.
Your staff can come back for refreshers when needed and you can benefit from the work we have put in earlier to help you scale your learning and development efforts. What’s more, is that our training is flexible. There are no booking or cancellation fees. When your critical staff need to reschedule or cancel, you have no financial penalties nor have you consumed your budget for training that didn’t go ahead.
Additionally, this is why we offer online instructor-led training. If you are concerned about cancellations, you don’t need to buy flights or book accommodation for your staff to attend on-site training sessions, it can be delivered online too.
Is this a sustainable way to scale your company?
Your team need to be able to maintain the incoming workload. If they are expected to design and create new training sessions with each new request, is this sustainable in the long term? Definitely not if you want to scale. Nor is it sustainable to the opportunities to scale if you were to shift the responsibility to an external team.
Subscribing to TaaS does not shift the responsibilities. Rather, it leverages the work we have put in to provide scalable training services. You are not expecting us to design or create the training sessions. We have already done that. Now we are providing you with the service of delivering the training sessions. This will help you to scale your company in a sustainable way that can be maintained in the long term in a cost-effective manner.
With TaaS, no matter how many people you have, you can register them for training sessions that best suit you. No need to organise the training each month nor plan for it. We have it all organised. So, if you are going to outsource ensure that you are not in a situation that will require you to continually expand or buy more training as your team grows.
The Wrap Up
Outsourcing the entire learning and development tasks to an external team won’t help you to scale your company as you are only shifting the responsibility of who designs and creates your training. This will still include time and cost constraints that are not sustainable to the scalability of your company. However, subscribing to TaaS where you have endless opportunities to enrol your staff at a fraction of the cost of in-house training will help you to scale your company.
To learn more about TaaS, click here .