Contents of Elearning! Magazine - MAY-JUN 2012

Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.

Page 39 of 54

takes the same amount of development time, right? Yes, but your exposure is much greater on your top five best-attend- ed courses. When I was running customer educa-
tion for software companies, my top five courses generated 80 percent of my rev- enue. These were the ones that I wanted to be impressive, because they were my team's first exposure to a new student. So we did an ABC analysis, and decid-
ed how to allocate time and resources based on how much revenue each course was driving. We challenged ourselves to re-scope or combine the 50 percent of our courses that were generating only 20 per- cent of our revenue. Whatever informa- tion we did not put into our courses, we made available through electronic or other means.
TIP #8
LEVERAGE ANOTHER ORGANIZATION'S EXPERTS FOR DELIVERY OF
CONTENT
These can be challenging discussions, especially if you have a customer charter. Remembering back to an age-old conflict between education and consulting, it was- n't uncommon to see a consulting resource delivering one of my classes to keep up their billable time. The solution? Sit down with the consult-
ing team and work out a way to pay them for teaching your classes. That keeps them billable, while at the same time you get their top-line expertise. But there are other ways to leverage
experts within an organization. Our top sales classes for new hires were taught by our best sales people. In fact, it was part of a regional manager'
s MBOs to teach new hires.
will find hundreds of ways to leverage another organization'
If you look around your organization you s talents. Think about who can
help you deliver new hire orientation, and you'll see that there are hundreds of choices that the new hires might enjoy. Who wouldn't want to hear the company'
s President or the
Vice President of Product Development talk about new products or services?
TIP #9
USE A VARIABLE STAFFING MODEL
This is a great way to reduce one of the largest expenses in your organiza- The most effective organizations look at
those seasons closely and evaluate the amount of fluctuation occurring in their staffing needs. That fluctuation is then translated into a variable staffing model that relies on outsourced resources to fill the gap.
tion. There is always an ebb and flow in business cycles. Retailing is the best exam- ple of seasonality, but seasons also occur around tax preparation, mortgage lending, construction, and many other industries.
Tip #9: If you
experience a 20 percent shift in demand, then
you might plan on outsourcing 20 percent of your staff
If you experience a 20 percent shift in demand, then you might plan on outsourc- ing 20 percent of your staff. This stabilizes your internal staffing considerably, which is a great benefit in uncertain economic times.
TIP #10
REVIEW COMPETENCY MAPS
In a competency-driven world, it's
not uncommon to find thousands or even tens of thousands of competencies being defined in larger organizations. It is those competencies, and their gaps, that drive much of your internal training business. Some of the largest enterprises are now
creating committees to review those com- petency maps to streamline them across departments or agencies. Leadership is a common one that gets multiplied by minor derivations in competencies. Those minor derivatives often translate into multiple courses, with fewer attendees in each. Standardizing competencies across the enterprise reverses that inefficiency.
Let us know if you found these tips and techniques helpful. You can contact Joe DiDonato at jdidonato@2Elearning.com if you wish to share what your organization did to "survive and thrive,
" and we'll share
that information in our blog at http://blogs.2Elearning.com.
Elearning! May / June 2012 37