Employee training can be a costly part of any organization’s expenses, especially in retail, hospitality, and food service industries. Recent studies show that it can cost 16% of annual salary to replace a high-turnover, low-pay employee, which includes the time of training those new employees, not to mention the time after training that it takes to get someone new up to speed.
What can IT do to reduce the costs associated with employee training? And how can IT help lower the budget for implementing the best training available for your organization (reducing employee replacement cost and, hopefully, turnover in general)?
Third Party Systems vs. Internal Development
There are several companies that focus on creating training programs for organizations that might be a more economical option than spending the time and money developing a unique employee training software system in-house.
This might seem like an easy choice given the time and effort associated with each option but be sure to consider whether an out-of-the-box product will be able to meet the needs of your specific training program. If it can’t adequately cover all the bases, then you might find yourself paying for it with more training than necessary or high employee turnover.
IT can help by presenting the business with a cost-benefit analysis that details one year of expense for using an off-the-shelf solution vs. internal development.
Local vs. Cloud Servers
If you’re developing an online training program, one factor that most people outside of IT don’t consider is where to host the platform. Sure, local hosting offers the ability for your organization to own the server and storage, but when it comes time to expand, you may find yourself with a hefty bill for new hardware and equipment.
Conversely, using a cloud hosting service limits the amount of upfront costs your business will need to spend on servers and space, but the key is finding a reliable and redundant service provider. When there are outages, you are at the mercy of a third party to address the issues.
No one in the company is better suited to weigh in on the long-term costs of storage than IT. Provide an honest breakdown of the cost of each option.
Bandwidth
In retail spaces, good bandwidth speeds are not easy to come by. When determining the right amount of bandwidth for your store, it’s not always the case that more is better. With some strategic decisions, you can maximize your bandwidth at each retail space without requiring the biggest bandwidth package possible from your Internet provider.
You can see to it that your employee training programs don’t hog the bandwidth during the day by setting the hardware to receive updates during off hours, and making your training content available offline. This saves bandwidth for business-critical needs such as credit card processing, security systems and POS functions.
For more information about creating and launching a mobile training platform and how IT can make decisions that positively affect your organizations budget, download our latest eBook, IT's "Lucky" 13- Step Guide To Launching A Mobile Training Program.
This could be the beginning of a new, more cost-effective training program for your company.
