by Mohana Radhakrishnan

The research we conducted this year with www.TrainingIndustry.com has been useful to training organizations across the country, as training budgets are slashed and money becomes tighter.

Our most important advice for maximizing the value of your training budget is to focus on managing your training organization like a business.

The first step is to know your training organization's core competency, and your true value to the company as a whole. If you don't add value through training administration or technology management, then it might be a good idea to shed that work or find ways to streamline it. We've found these two areas - as well as training content development - typically are the best candidates for improving efficiency and offloading responsibilities.

According to our research, the average cost of administering a training program is around 40% of a total training budget. Streamlining or shedding some of these responsibilities makes it possible to redeploy a percentage of your budget to more valuable services like training delivery and content development, and yields a greater return on investment. Business process reengineering and outsourcing allow your organization to operate in a more strategic way - by letting you focus on designing and delivering learning initiatives that directly help your company improve its performance and competitive position.

Another consideration in a financial crunch is the importance of marketing your training programs. Just because you build a program doesn't mean learners will enroll! This is especially true if you're moving away from instructor-led training to more cost-effective models such as e-learning. This cultural shift typically requires internal marketing to achieve a reasonable adoption rate.

To learn more about this concept and to learn how to eliminate training waste, download our white paper.

If you need advice on how to increase the efficiency of your learning organization, feel free to contact me.