From Teacher to Trainer I: Cost Perspectives

I was talking to a high school teacher the other day, she's been at it a while and is thinking of moving on to something else. She wondered if getting into corporate training of some kind makes sense -- and that just started me thinking about some of the differences between teaching at a formal educational institution and developing and delivering training in the business world.

I've been making a living as an instructional designer and content developer for businesses for the past 25 years, but before that, I taught at middle school, high school, community college, and university levels. (And I'm still in the classroom, but as a volunteer teaching the Irish language -- see Gaeltacht Minnesota.) So over the next few posts, I'm going to try to look back at some of the differences between these two environments.

One of the big adjustments from a public education to a private training (on staff or as a freelance/contract developer) environment is thinking about costs all the time. You have to get corporate management to "buy" the training, to invest time and resources into its development and delivery, even if their own staff are creating and delivering the information. If you're used to assuming that a certain time slot will always be set aside for a certain subject, you'll need to make an adjustment.

Now, if you're in teaching, I know that there's always competition -- there are more things to teach than there is time in the schedule, or space in the catalog on campus, to teach them. Launching a new subject, or even preserving arts and music education, for that matter, can be very challenging.

Still, the need to justify training in the business world is way beyond what most teachers are used to. Businesses want to make money, so training should produce a "return on investment" (ROI). (Now, to be truthful, an astonishing amount of training goes on in the busines world that produces very little return, and no one notices, but that's an entirely different theme.)

The purpose of business training is to influence how employees do their jobs. That means you have to deliver information in some format -- live, in a meeting, seminar, teleconference, online in a course or chat session, or in the form of documentation, self-study packets, print/audio/video modules, and so on.

That information takes someone's time to deliver, and it usually takes a good deal more time to create, to put together so that it truly does influence employees' behaviors. All that time (either from internal staff, or by hiring outsiders like me) costs money, in wages or in fees, and that time and money could be put into delivering services or producing widgets.

So two likely questions about any training project are:

1. Does the behavior change we are pursuing produce benefits ("return") that justify these costs?
2. Does this project have a sufficiently high probability of producing that desired change to justify these costs?

Obviously, there are several issues we have to address before we can justify the effort. Some of them have to do with what we're trying to achieve, what employees should do differently, and how that will help the company. Others have to do with the costs of developing and delivering the training (and unfortunately, a great many people in business are not very good at looking at both development and delivery when they evaluate the costs associated with changing employee work methods).

We're interested in costs at the moment, so, for next time, let's think about the following question:

What is the cost category, the type of cost, that is the biggest obstacle to implementing new, often badly needed, training in a typical company?