Do You Know What Your IT Training Content Is Really Costing You?

Understanding the Total Cost of Training Content Ownership

As an IT training business owner, have you ever analyzed the true cost of owning your training content? Is it even sensible for your IT training business to allocate resources for developing and maintaining training material? Wouldn’t work with professional training content providers be a better alternative?

An Evolving Business and Evolving Customer Expectations

The training business is evolving. During the past decade, we have seen that while the total IT training pie is growing and the number of technologies and frameworks in IT are increasing, customer expectations are also changing. They demand different delivery forms, both as learner preferences evolve, as well as the effectiveness gap between traditional training forms and technology-enabled training declines.

More organizations and learners are now looking for higher quality of learning experience and more flexibility offered by technology-enabled delivery mediums. Training providers are looking to carry offerings that include different forms of training. The development of professional content requires more diverse skills and a higher standard. Developing training content for e-learning, blended delivery forms or even the traditional classroom forms where technology is starting to play a bigger role is becoming more complex and certainly more expensive. Now consider having to do this across an increasingly larger portfolio.

What Every IT Training Business Needs to Consider

1. Content Development Costs

Initially, there is the cost associated with content development such as paying a trainer to write the course and a designer to optimize the course materials. Once the course is created, the accreditation process needs to take place. And of course, an IT training business needs to maintain the course going forward.

2. Content Standard and Quality

Many training companies have traditionally had their instructors use their bench time (their free time) to develop training content without even making the effort to measure aspects such as the quality of content.

When you get an instructor to develop the training content without proper support from instructional designers and media experts, you often end up with content that requires significant work and maintenance to live up to the standards which are demanded by today’s audience.

3. Cost of Not Staying Relevant

Creating and maintaining content that supports the interaction requirements and blended forms of learning – which are so often required to be relevant in today’s training landscape – can stack up the costs really fast.

4. Creating Versus Licensing IT Training Content

Here are some of the elements to consider while developing the business case for creating versus licensing your IT training content:

• initial development subject matter expert time
• instruction design time
• media time
• formatting of student books and print-ready versions
• instructor notes and guidance (if using across multiple instructors)
• quality assurance, reviews and edit time
• accreditation costs and effort
• ongoing costs (maintenance) subject matter expert time
• media updates
• ongoing accreditations, audits and review costs

This analysis doesn’t even consider the following elements:

• minimum quality requirements and expectations
• risks associated with changes in syllabus
• evolution of the standards
• frameworks associated with the training content

Making a successful business case for creating and maintaining your own IT training content is not easy. In fact, in order to develop just a simple version of training content for your regular classroom delivery includes several hidden costs. And if you also offer (or wish to offer) consistent blended and e-learning versions of the same training content, the costs can be onerous.

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We speak with authority when we say that by working with professional training content providers your overall cost of training content can be reduced immensely. See how ITpreneurs can help your IT training business reduce your overall training content cost by up to 80%.