What is your Return On Instruction?
When budgets are tight, many organisations make the mistake of cutting back on employee training. But well structured, relevant training courses can deliver valuable financial and operational returns.
It is hardly surprising that organisations are cutting back on all non-essential expenditure. Every new day brings fresh headlines of economic recession, and even successful businesses need to be prudent. At this time, many organisations may be reviewing their staff training budgets and considering if they can be reduced. However, before companies calculate the possible cost savings, they should first consider the return on investment (ROI) that they gain from training.
It is difficult to put a precise figure on the financial returns that can be gained from a day of training. Typical ROI analyses are difficult to apply to training, because they require many different data sets from several different points in time. However, there is strong anecdotal evidence that ESRI (UK)’s user and developer training heightens the value that organisations gain from their use of GIS. Training can increase staff efficiency and productivity, allowing more tasks to be accomplished more quickly. It is common for professionals to leave our courses with a new technique up their sleeves that will save them hours of manual processing time.
The added knowledge that employees gain from training can, however, bring even greater financial returns. Employees who are properly trained can avoid and identify system and data errors that, if undetected, could be costly and damaging to repair. Highly skilled employees can also explore possibilities for new GIS-based applications that could deliver new services for customers or streamline internal processes. Either way, employees’ innovation with GIS and their full exploitation of its capabilities can reveal new ways to improve internal cost efficiency or open up new revenue streams. Whether it is quantified or not, this is undisputable ‘return on instruction’.
In times of economic difficulty, training is as important as ever. If teams are shrinking, the remaining members of staff need to develop to replace lost skills. Organisations also need to uplift the capabilities of employees in smaller teams to that they can endeavour to maintain the team’s overall productivity levels, with fewer people.
To enable its customers to carry on investing in crucial employee training, ESRI (UK) has frozen the prices of its scheduled courses for the fourth year running. We have also developed a ‘Training Needs Analysis’ model of training that allows organisations to identify the precise training needs of individual employees more easily and adopt a more strategic approach to skills acquisition. ESRI (UK) also offers a technical ‘Train the Trainer’ programme and certification, which allows organisations to equip their own employees with the skills and techniques to pass on expertise to their colleagues. Through these approaches, and others like them, ESRI (UK) helps its customers to provide highly relevant and cost effective training for staff – and maximise their return on instruction.
