
When Outsourcing Training is Your Best Option by Cindy Stradling CSP, CPC
Training is one of the most critical pieces to ensuring that new employees are properly prepared to do their jobs. It is also a critical piece of employee development, helping employees to grow in their careers, enabling them to take on more responsibility and handle greater challenges. As important as training is, it can often fall by the wayside, particularly when times are busy or budgets are tight. However, continuing with training even during these times is important to keeping your business on track.
In some cases, completing employee training with existing personnel as trainers is the best option. However, outsourcing the training is often the best option for your business. Consider the following times when outsourcing a training program might be the bet option.
- Time Constraints. When your business is going through a very busy time, outsourcing training to another company or individual keeps all of your employees on their regular jobs, rather than taking their time to train others. When you want to keep productivity high, it doesn’t make sense to have your own employees acting as trainers and students.
- Budget Constraints. Though outsourcing training can seem expensive, it can be less so than hiring full time permanent employee trainers. Employees are expensive, particularly when you consider the cost of benefits. In many cases, it is cheaper in the long run to use an outside company.
- Specialized Training. It is often more powerful to use outside trainers for specialized training. This is particularly true when you want employees trained on something that is outside your core knowledge base. Outsourced trainers are experts in the field in which they train, and they offer insight into the subject, as well as proven training techniques.
- Impact Training. When you need training to have a powerful impact on your employees, it may be wise to use an outside trainer. When you bring in trainers who are new to your employees, they may have more credibility in the field, simply because they are not part of your organization. Many companies use, for example, professional sales trainers to come in yearly to train sales people on new techniques as well as to motivate them for success. This sort of training would not likely be as effective coming from a regular member of the organization, even if that person possessed great training skills.
When you are budgeting and planning for employee training, it is wise to look at a variety of scenarios in order to meet training goals and needs. Successful companies find many ways to train employees, using both in house resources and those that can be outsourced to create an effective training plan.