How Small Businesses can Deploy Learning And Development Without Breaking The Bank

Published on: 14/09/2019 | Updated on: October 25, 2024

It is the age of startups. While a healthy new business environment has a number of pros, there are a number of challenges that come with increased competition.

One such challenge is employee retention. Small businesses need invested employees in helping them sail the currents of success. However, with large enterprises backed by virtually endless budgets offering better benefits and pay, keeping employees happy does become a challenge.

Learning and development have emerged as one of the strongest motivators for employees to stick to certain organizations.

In fact, in a survey, 87% millennials said learning and development opportunities as a “very important” factor that influences their decision of staying at their current organization.

So how can small businesses contribute to the professional development for their employees while staying in budget? The answer is eLearning.

Let’s see how small businesses can use eLearning technologies to their advantage:

Make Use Of An LMS

A learning management system, or LMS, in simplest terms, is a platform that can be used to deploy learning material easily. Most modern learning management systems are based on the cloud, and come at a variety of price ranges to suit businesses of all sizes.

With easy to use interface, LMS offers a variety of features that allow businesses to create, deploy, and track corporate training courses without having to spend money on specialized trainers. Moreover, since these are based on the cloud, the learners are free to access them anywhere and anytime.

This means, the training does not need to hamper your organizations’ daily productivity and can happen during downtime or after office hours. If you have employees working from remote locations, learning management systems make it easy to deliver online training to them, with no hassle involved. In fact, organizations that work with a mix of remote employees and office-based teams can take advantage of learning management systems to deliver seamless training to their employees, regardless of their location.

Use Ready-Made Content

Corporate training, for many businesses, means compliance training. Since within industries, businesses adhere to similar compliance standards, the training needed is also pretty similar.

Thanks to this, modern businesses are not required to create their own course materials, which takes a significant investment of time and resources. Nowadays, businesses simply need to compare content providers for business process training, choose the one that aligns with their needs and simply start using the content to train their employees.

The cost of pre-made training content is considerably less than the cost (in terms of time and money) of creating a course from scratch. Moreover, with professionally made courses, businesses can get high-quality training material for their employees, which may be difficult to create with the resources available to them.

Pro Tip: It is smart to compare eLearning providers by getting samples delivered to you before choosing one. Doing so is better when it comes to testing the quality of work and compatibility of a content provider.

Cut Costs And Boost Effectiveness With Microlearning

Microlearning is a hot trend within learning circles, and the reason is simple, it is more effective than other learning strategies. Before we get into how microlearning can reduce costs and be more effective, let’s understand in-depth, what microlearning is.

Microlearning is defined as a short and highly focused learning nugget that is designed for a specific audience, with a specific goal in mind. Microlearning typically uses media-rich forms of delivery and thanks to modern learning management systems, most microlearning courses and modules can be accessed from multiple devices.

Since most small businesses cannot afford to hire instructional designers, they need to follow good instructional practices to maximize the results of their courses, while minimizing the time taken to complete them.

One such best practice is breaking down the course material into bite-sized chunks of information paired with an interactive exercise. Some of the benefits of microlearning are:

• Since people learn best when lessons are broken down into smaller chunks, the overall effectiveness of the course increases and the time taken to complete the course goes down. This way, the overall cost to the business to conduct the course also goes down.
• Microlearning courses also have a shorter development cycle. This means, the businesses that need customized training content, and are developing it in-house, can reduce their course development costs by developing microlearning modules. Since the cost of course development is lower, microlearning modules also come cheaper for businesses that purchase them from a content provider.
• Microlearning modules can also be used as stand-alone lessons, or as part of multiple different courses, making them agile and pocket-friendly.
• With industries going through changes constantly, the relevance of course materials is short-lived. While updating a complete course can prove to be an expensive undertaking, the ease of updating microlearning modules can help businesses overcome this training obstacle.

With the advent of mobile-based learning, the effects of microlearning have been further amplified. Most users are already in the habit of consuming short videos and news through social and news apps. For such users, microlearning introduced on mobile devices can prove to be extremely effective.

Conclusion

Deploying learning and development opportunities may seem difficult for small businesses that are strapped for the budget. However, such opportunities are the need of the hour, especially when it comes to retaining top talent that has the potential to take your business to new heights.

With due diligence, smart use of resources and technology, and adopting best practices for delivering learning materials, small businesses can overcome the perceived difficulties related to corporate training.

Not to forget, there is great incentive in doing so. When your employees feel that you are investing in their future and are placing trust in their ability to grow, they are not only motivated to stick with your organization through thick and thin, they also find themselves motivated to bring their best to work, every day.

This article mentioned some of the ways small businesses can deploy corporate training without having to mess with their budgets. Did we miss out on any strategies that you use at your organization? Don’t forget to share them in the comment section below!