Tuesday, July 15, 2008

5 tips for employee training on a tight budget

The economy is down and the squeeze on your budget gets tighter everyday. Human resources and employee training budgets are the first places companies go to cut down spending, but don’t let go of hope just yet.

With some creative thinking and determination, you can still provide quality employee training even when your budget is taking a hit. Here are five simple tips on how to cut training costs without losing quality:

  1. Instead of sending your team to an outside training course, where you have to buy a ticket for each person and pay for travel expenses, find a comparable video training program to bring in house. You can train an entire room full of people for the cost of one video.


  2. Enroll your group in online training seminars. Similar to purchasing a video, you can train many for the cost of one and avoid those pesky travel expenses.


  3. Find trainers within your organization. In any organization there are those who already play the trainer role. Develop your in-house resources with “Train the Trainer” training programs.


  4. Use the company as the classroom. Look at different jobs in the company as training opportunities. If you’re training employees on leadership or teamwork, place employees in new roles around the office for a hands-on learning experience.


  5. Become a smart shopper. Use tools like TrainingTime.com to find and compare employee training programs that will work within your budget.

Just because your budget is shrinking, it doesn’t mean the quality of your training and development programs have to shrivel up with it. If you take the time to do some research and get a little creative, your training budget may not look so small after all.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Of course anther way to train on a tight budget is to buy affordable training materials and establish train-the-trainer programs within your company and use the materials to teach them. You can save tons of money this way.


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