How can eLearning help a Small Business?

How can eLearning help a Small Business?
August 11, 2016

In the era of cut throat competition and shrinking margins, small businesses are under constant pressure. Anyone who has had the experience of running a business knows how difficult it can be to keep operating costs low and profits reasonable. This is especially difficult when turnover is high and subsequently standards drop.

Effectively, the consistency of products and services being offered over time define profits, but the thing to remember is that consistency depends a lot on training. Research has shown that quality training has a direct correlation with quality and consistency of service, and ultimately with business reputation and profits.

A lack of training can also lead to costly mistakes by employees which can negatively impact a business within a matter of days.

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In the era of cut throat competition and shrinking margins, small businesses are under constant pressure. Anyone who has had the experience of running a business knows how difficult it can be to keep operating costs low and profits reasonable. This is especially difficult when turnover is high and subsequently standards drop.

The problem for small businesses has historically been the cost, speed and timing of training. However, this problem has significantly been solved by the advent of eLearning as all of these issues can be eliminated by the implementation of an eLearning solution.

However, a lot of small businesses seem unaware of this fact. On merit, implementing a cost effective and intuitive eLearning solution can do wonders for SMEs in terms of improving productivity, employee morale and ultimately profits.

Recent research on training trends has shown that on average, a small business spends in excess of $300 yearly training an employee. With a quality eLearning solution such as Udutu, this cost can come down to as low as $50 per employee.

There are many ways a small business can effectively take help of an eLearning solution and improve its productivity, efficiency and ultimately its bottom line. Some of them are as follows:

  1. Replacing the Training Manager:A Small business normally has high turnover which forces existing managers to take on new roles, especially that of a training manager whose prime job is to train new employees and get them on board as quickly as possible. Even when there are no formal roles for a such a position, the costs can be high due to lost productivity and work hours for the engaged manager. All these costs associated with staff services as well as onboarding and training can be reduced by implementing a cost effective eLearning solution. This system would allow a business to create learning paths, assign courses and monitor engagement and training from a single dashboard. Such a scenario allows the business to go about focussing on their business objectives while training routinely takes care of itself.
  2. Eliminating External TrainingMany small businesses make the mistake of outsourcing their training needs to external parties. This is not productive as this is essentially nothing more than a form of fruitless defrayal. Businesses settling for whatever they think is the best available training solution for their needs rather than looking for an optimal solution personalized for their needs is not industrious in the long run. An eLearning solution is an example of a tailored product that can be much more effective as it eliminates the need for the employees to travel to external locations as well as creating personalized training options at the same time. A business can go as far as creating customized training modules according to different functional needs. Creating customizable and intuitive courses through an eLearning solution is done easily which gives a personalized touch to training solutions. Personalized training in small business has always been too expensive or difficult, but an eLearning solution makes it simple and easy.
  3. One Source for All Resource MaterialsAn eLearning solution allows a small business to store and access all their training material in one place, and that too in the cloud. This eliminates the need to worry about files, folders and access to information. All you need to do is to share a link and all your data is accessible by all your employees. As the learning is self paced, all the employees need to do is access that information at their time discretion and then take assessments to validate that learning. Moreover, this makes it easier for the business owners to encourage staff to undertake training as it doesn’t come at any external cost, and this in turn improves employee morale and engagement levels.
  4. Compliance TrainingAs a small business owner, it can often be intimidating and time consuming to keep up to date with all the compliance laws and procedures. A failure to keep up with these practices can result in fines and legal issues. An eLearning solution will allow you to quickly design and access quality compliance courses which will help you save time and effort. An eLearning solution allows a level of consistency to be maintained in such matters which otherwise can not be achieved. This consistency is crucial to maintain standards and compliance levels.Considering all this, eLearning makes a lot of sense for small businesses. The advent of technology has made the playing field between small and large corporations fairer as small businesses now have access to the same training materials and solutions upon which large corporations count upon every day. Its high time small businesses utilize such valuable tools and increase their sales and profits.

 

Questions About Online Learning? Contact Udutu for Answers!

Udutu’s free course authoring software lends itself to teams who must collaborate to create training, or to groups who are scattered and to Subject Matter Experts who don’t have the time or inclination to become technologists.

As always, if you have any questions about course authoring and creating effective elearning content, don’t hesitate to contact the team at Udutu.

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