“Training cost” is a favorite topic of conversation among training professionals and between training staff and management. As convenient and affordable tools are applied to move training to online delivery, one factor, delivery cost, has shrunk.

I’m not convinced this is entirely good news. People talk about “training delivery” very glibly when they should be talking a little more thoughtfully about design, development and delivery.

Changing employee behavior to establish and sustain best business practices requires more than mere “formatting” to produce a “deliverable.” Too often “training costs” refers only to the delivery step in the training process, when participants actually work with content. Driven by low delivery expense, apparent convenience (see “Your Inconvenience-O-Meter”) and overall “sex appeal,” this focus on delivery method sometimes obscures the value of sound design and development.

The Decline of Design and Development

Both training staff and management can be seduced by an oversimplified definition of “training” when existing courses are converted to online format (which is where we usually “pilot” the new approach). Everyone is delighted with reduced expenses for employee travel, meals, facilitator time and duplication of materials.

But in that situation, much of the design and development work has already been done. Most of the effort goes into putting existing content online.

Now, there should be additional design and development costs for even these simple conversions. Too often, existing material is simply loaded into an online format with little consideration of what is required to make the online version as effective as the original. This is probably why I see so many really good classroom courses being turned into really mediocre online training.

As training staffs apply user-friendly software to create online courses on their desktops they may assume that since that final step in the process has become easier, creating and delivering truly effective training has also become easier.

What has become much, much easier is generating poor quality online training quickly. I cringe at how many “online courses” are really just slightly enhanced, read-on-your-own-time PowerPoint presentations. Whether or not a course should even be delivered online is a design decision, but more and more often, design and development are driven by the delivery method.

True Training Costs

Equating “training costs” with “delivery costs” has made it more challenging to budget properly for good instructional design and skillful development. When it comes to creating a completely new course, everyone expects expenses to be in line with their initial conversion experiences, which faced almost exclusively with delivery issues.

This is precisely why training professionals are needed—to educate management, to ensure that the two steps that contribute the most to training impact, sound instructional design and thoughtful content development, are not neglected simply because they are more difficult to see and understand.

The ultimate cost of being beguiled by the ease of building an online course is the cost to the company of less effective training, of the reduced impact on employee performance that comes from shortchanging the design end of the process. It reminds me of discussions about a “carbon tax,” or pricing based on total impact. If you had to pay more for a car with lower mileage or higher emissions to reflect its impact on the environment, you might make different purchasing decisions.

Similarly, if the base model preserves significant design and development components, the company will make better decisions about investing in training. A few well-designed training activities (however they are delivered) will contribute much more to your company’s success than a wealth of second-rate courses. Don’t let shortcuts to building the online components of your training shortchange the overall experience and the expected improvement in employee performance.