Investing in and offering eLearning opportunities to your employees is a necessity, as well as, the need of the hour in today’s dynamic work environment. However, calculating the Return On Investment (ROI), of such eLearning training programs is also a necessity as it demonstrates the gaps in your eLearning strategy and allows you to utilise your funds better. It is a perfect measure to calculate the success of training programs in order to ensure that the cost of the program has efficiently translated into benefits, through; improved employee performance, and ultimately better organizational profits. While there is a surfeit of methods, software and resources to calculate the eLearning ROI there are specific factors to consider while doing so.
The most important cost and benefit factors that you need to consider in order to arrive at an accurate analysis of your ROI:
COST CONSIDERATIONS
- STAFFING AND CONCEALED COSTS
While making the transfer from traditional learning to eLearning training programs, always keep in mind the cost that comes attached to designing the custom e-Program. Costs attached to hiring a content, graphics, voice and subject matter expert resource to create your program need to be reviewed carefully. If you choose to buy an off-the-shelf eLearning program, ensure it is a unique program that will provide your organisation with skills to distinguish them from the competitors.
- TECHNOLOGY AND CONTENT COSTS
Ensure your new eLearning training program can be seamlessly integrated into your current systems without causing loss of working time. Rich content that has integrated multimedia, audio-visual modules and videos may not be supported on all systems. Sometimes, eLearning programs may cause technological glitches in terms of program administration, disruptions due to platform incompatibility, network issues, etc., hence, it is important to choose programs that are immediately compatible or require minimal re-coding to become compatible with your existing systems.
BENEFIT CONSIDERATIONS
- PERSONNEL AND TRAVEL COST SAVINGS
Traditional methods of training programs involve hiring a physical team of instructors for whom the organisation must pay separately to cover boarding, lodging and travel. In cases where organisations have multiple locations, the cost increases that many times. So investing in an eLearning training program not only removes these costs but also allows you to administer the training across multiple locations without worrying about personnel travel costs.
With a physical instructor assessments become laborious as they are manual and could even be stressful for the employees. Maintaining records and session feedback also is a task. However, investing in an eLearning program that comes with a Learning Management System (LMS) can prove to be very beneficial as it allows for the automatic tracking of performance and training satisfaction. Furthermore, assessments can be fun when it is enriched with videos, audios, puzzles and gamified levels – all of which are difficult and expensive for a conventional instructor to provide.
- DATA COLLECTION TO REFINE ELEARNING PROGRAMS
With eLearning training programs effort, time and resources required to collect data related to the program can be greatly reduced by automating the process. Employees can provide very specific feedback on the system itself and training being translated into effort at work can be measured more accurately. This helps designing future training programs more easily and can greatly reduce costs.
Appraising the ROI of your organisation’s eLearning training program is perhaps one of the best methods to ascertain its value. This ROI calculation allows you to justify the need and costs of training programs planned for the year, and aids in ensuring that no stone is left unturned while picking an eLearning training program.
