We want to spend some time going deeper on how to think about the costs of your learning program.
Over the last few years, as Bright has evolved, we’ve had many executives come to us asking about what skills they should be looking for in their L&D team members. We actually have a whole other lesson on this topic elsewhere in Bright Academy.
We often think of skills like ‘Strategic or Creative.’ But the one we increasingly talk about is ‘Analytical.’
Learning is fundamentally about optimizing performance given a limited set of resources. So just like every other discipline in the business, we have to be very thoughtful about the numbers behind our work, and be ready to explain and defend them to the rest of the team.
To make this practical, we want to spend a little time talking about how you can develop a model of operations for your training program - usually just through a simple spreadsheet in Excel.
A model of operations articulates how many learners we’re supporting, how we’re supporting them, and all the costs associated with that support. And if you’re doing it right, it will eventually boil down to how much does my organization spend per year per learner. To help guide this conversation, we've provided a simplified example of an operations model in Excel. This is a free resource attached to this article, but you can of course feel free to design your own as you plan out your program.
- First - if you take a quick glance at this document, it’s a one-stop-shop for some of the most important numbers and costs and activities related to my program.
- Let’s start by talking about the potential cost drivers of learning
- IT
- FTE costs for Trainers
- Wages for associates
- Travel & Entertainment
- Physical Space
- Materials
- Productivity
- Rework
- The next big set of numbers we need to document has to do with the population of learners and training deployment
- How many learners are there annually?
- If your programs are hybrid, how many live sessions
- Apart from live time, what administrative costs are there to keep up the program? Think updates, scheduling, monthly refreshers, technology management
- For Bright this could also be training your AI models
- For some organizations, this could also be the cost of Manager time coaching
- Let’s go through this example model briefly (need to reference a pre-made template)
- If you do all of these things well, first, you should be able to articulate total cost of L&D to your organization - some of which may be hidden
- Identify this will also enable you to get to some kind of Cost per Learner
- This is an important number because it can help your organization START to think about the ROI of learning
- Take the example of a customer success agent who makes $20 per hour, trains for 4 weeks at onboarding, and generates $150k in revenue a year
- Compare that with a healthcare provider who makes $250k per year, trains for 4 weeks at onboarding and generates $2M in revenue a year
- The other benefit of this model is that it helps you make informed decision about your modality selections
- Take a look at this example - let’s compare two program options. In the first I Can train 3000 people per year with live webinars for 4 weeks, or I can train them through a hybrid program for 4 weeks, OR I can train them through an immersive learning model for 3 weeks
- While I’m obviously selling you a little bit on the model here, you can do this analysis on your own and make the decisions that look best for your
- We’ve attached a sample model of operations template to this article. Feel free to edit it as you see fit. And as part of your Bright Academy subscription, if you’d like to create a draft and share it with your Account Manager, we’d always be happy to share feedback on how your approach compares to others in your industry!