subject: Professional Development Training - Making Do In A Recession [print this page] Author: Toan Dinh Author: Toan Dinh
Companies are competing more than ever to survive in this recession. Costly professional development workshops and classes are not in the budget of most company. Cost cutting is the order of business. Employees are being asked to do more with less. But as employees take on more responsibility they need to know more. How can they get training at a low cost? Right now using eLearning, the acquisition of new skills and knowledge accessed on corporate training Internet sites, is a resourceful choice. Contrary to conventional business wisdom, most organizations including non-profits have very similar professional development needs for basic skills not offered in the curricula of most schools and universities. These are the nuts and bolts type skills used daily in the workplace. They include skills like customer service, conflict resolution, listening, planning, budgeting, basic finance, ethics and other fundamentals. These are the skills that make companies grow and succeed. Elearning can be combined with instructor-led training when needed to be more effective for improving skills that require interfacing with people. Examples of this are facilitation, conflict resolution, listening and sales to name a few. Elearning classes can be very cost effective. In the past, eLearning was expensive to produce and costs prohibitive for delivery to a small number of people. Today, training companies, Universities, and professional associations offer eLearning on a pay-as-you-go basis. Therefore, companies, especially small businesses, no longer need to make a significant up front investment to implement their own training programs; eLearning courses are cost effective and readily available. The costs for eLearning classes are the areas of general knowledge and skills and for company specific or tailored classes are reasonable. The company only has to pay for development of the class while at the same time it receives the benefit of utilizing the class for years. The delivery cost per person is zero. Costs increase, by comparison, for instructor-led and tailored classes for two reasons. The first is that they take a considerable amount of time to develop, as they are totally unique to the company. Second, costs for an expert trainer are significant primarily because they can be very effective in transferring complex information and skills to employees. For more information, visit BradleyLambert.About the Author:
BradleyLambert.com is the website of Bradley Lambert Inc., an organizational performance solutions company specializing in organizational and corporate leadership development in LA. For more information, visit www.BradleyLambert.com.
