Three Reasons an Army of Trainers Won’t Win the War
When it comes to proprietary training, most large global organizations prefer to keep training in-house with an experienced team of trainers. This ensures that employees get the training expertise they need on demand – wherever and whenever they need it. Your trainers are experts in their field and they have a wealth of knowledge and experience when it comes to your organization. You are assured that the quality of training will be consistent, and your employees can learn first-hand from the best.
But what if there is a sudden need to scale up because of an application rollout or a change in policy? What if you must refuse training because a trainer is not available? Would you continue adding to your headcount? In our experience, we have seen that is not uncommon for large, global organizations to build armies of in-house trainers to meet these contingencies.
But is this the correct battleplan?
Here are three reasons why you may win the battle but lose the war.
Low Utilization
When you build a large army of trainers, chances are that there are periods of low demand when they are not completely utilized to their full potential in terms of time and skillset. A natural consequence of this is that you may not be able to justify the large headcount on your payroll if they are not training full time.
Scalability and Flexible Capacity
Scalability is a big challenge for global organizations whether you have face-to-face ILT or virtual ILT sessions. Your trainers may be reluctant to travel to different parts of the world. You may not get the mandate to deploy trainers in certain geographies. Even in case of VILT, training across time zones can be very challenging for some trainers. You may therefore have a case where trainer availability and scheduling take up most of your time.
High Fixed Costs
If your trainers are FTEs, your fixed costs are bound to be high. You will have to budget for a fixed internal headcount to meet the challenges of global scalability and capacity. This means that you are spending the same amount even when there is a dip in demand. You might think it evens out in the long run with periods of high demand but in our experience, our customers have realized savings upwards of 20% when they move from fixed to variable costs.
So how do you win the war?
At NIIT, we have the experience of delivering training at scale for many large, global organizations. We follow a proven three-step strategy of learning delivery outsourcing which results in a win-win situation for our clients.
Rebadge inhouse trainers to NIIT’s headcount
Our proven process of rebadging an organization’s trainers to NIIT’s headcount has helped our customers reduce training delivery costs dramatically. The added advantage of this strategy is that there is no impact in the quality of training delivery due to this change. Our customers no longer worry about low utilization, scalability, or fixed costs – they only pay for what they use.
Manage a scalable network of global trainers
NIIT has a worldwide network of over 2500 instructors who are willing to travel and deliver training worldwide. Moreover, we deploy regional and locally based trainers to mitigate the risk of travel challenges, should they arise. This enables us to deliver excellence at scale and meet variable demand across the globe. We ensure that these trainers have the experience and expertise to meet the most challenging customer demands.
Refactor roles and cross-utilize skills
In many cases, while training may be proprietary, industry fundamentals like compliance have many common threads. For example, a trainer whose expertise is compliance for banking may be cross-utilized across a broad spectrum of banking customers. This gives our customers the advantage of a variable cost model with flexible capacity without compromising on trainer expertise or the quality of training.