Three Most Common Challenges and Solutions
1. MONEY
Money is mentioned in over half of the responses. Training,
as we know, is the first budget to get cut and typically
the least represented department at budget meetings.
The respondents to this survey seem to bear this out.
There
are two issues with money: The lack of it for training
and the
cost to put together an effective e-Learning program.
Solutions:
As consumers you need to do your homework. Compare price
versus functionality of e-Learning solutions and ask
your vendors and yourselves a few more questions:
- Do I need every bell and whistle? Make a list
of, have-to-have, nice-to-have and can-live-without.
How many features in Word
or Excel do you really use?
- Can I initially choose a solution, get by with less functionality
and perhaps pay a little less? One caveat here.
If you take this approach, make sure your materials are easily transported.
- Can I get other departments in my organization involved
and divide the costs?
- Can I get my customer to help with
the development costs?
- Can I split up payments to the
vendor?
- Ask your vendors to publish their prices to
make your life easier. I cannot understand the idea
behind not
putting prices on their web sites. Are they worried about competition?
Pricing is just one of the factors needed to make
a decision, so
having it readily accessible makes it easy
for the customer to compare products.
How about asking management (or better yet find out
yourself):
- What is the cost to the organization to retrain
a new hire versus embellishing the skills of a current
employee in the
same job?
- How does our competitors train
their employees? Have we lost people to them?
- What
is a 10% skill improvement in the workforce worth to
the bottom line? What is it worth to the
top line?
- What percentage of sales is spent on training or career
development?
While management says it is still concerned with
Return on Investment (ROI), what it really
wants is profits.
Focusing on profits is not a bad thing. Companies
need profits to
stay in business and keep people employed.
Collect your statistics
and present a business case illustrating to
management how an effective e-Learning programming
improves
both the top
and bottom line. Once
again, it requires doing some homework. |
