How can you enhance training effectiveness on a tight budget?

Even if you're faced with a tight budget, there are a number of inexpensive ways to boost training effectiveness, according to Frank Troha, a learning and development consultant. Here are some low-cost strategies he recommends:

1. Take advantage of local colleges to the fullest. Many now offer instructional design services, multimedia production and online learning at reasonable rates.

2. Hire independent local consultants, coaches and trainers, instead of expensive, big-name consulting firms from far away.

3. Learn more about instructional design so you can create, streamline or customize programs that consistently meet your constituents' needs and minimize costs.

4. Develop lessons-learned information and put it online for easy access. Do the same for standard operating procedures and other how-to content. This can aid in the successful transfer of existing training and, in some cases, replace it.

5. Base training on your strategic plan. Set training priorities in accordance with it, and focus on those people whose performance is most crucial to your company's success.

6. Offer an expanded internal support system with greater mentoring, coaching and e-learning to enhance and accelerate in-house learning opportunities.

7. Search, find and apply for state grants. Do so even if you work for a profit organization.

8. Stimulate innovation. Set outrageous performance goals and let employees brainstorm faster, better and/or cheaper ways to train to attain them.

9. Use your network of learning and development associates and the Internet to keep up with new training technologies and programs. Today's tighter budgets are prompting more creative solutions than ever.

10. Always determine whether training is the most appropriate intervention for a given target audience. Ask, If their lives depended on it, could they perform properly? If so, you do not have a training problem.

Source:Boosting Training Effectiveness on a Tight Budget, Instructional Design and Development Consulting, One Landmark Square, Port Chester, NY 10573; telephone: 914-933-0114.