You already know the benefits and what it can do for your company, but now you just have to convince your boss to invest in eLearning!
As online learning becomes the most popular way to perform workplace training these days, some employees might find that their managers need a bit of a “push” to test out the latest trend in corporate improvement. So, how can you do this? Well, the easiest way to convince someone of something is to appeal to their mindset.
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As a boss, they want their company to stay ahead of the trends and employ only the very best people; thankfully for you, online training can help them achieve just that. Here are a few simple techniques to convince your boss to invest in eLearning programs:
1. Discuss Your Competitors
Your biggest supporter here is going to be FOMO, and for those of you not hip with the current lingo, this translates to “Fear of Missing Out”. If your boss is a savvy businessperson, they’ll want to do anything they can to keep up with the competition, particularly if they’ve managed to find an effective training method that works for their staff.
Pull some facts and data about specific training programs or modules that your competitors implemented with their staff, and show them the results. When you can’t prove just how well eLearning works within your own company, the comparison is the next best thing.
But what do you do if you can’t find anything specific to your competitors? Thankfully, the results are all there with the top performing companies in this country. Reports say that in 2014, over 41 percent of Fortune 500 companies had an implemented eLearning training program, with that number likely to have significantly increased in the past two years.
2. Have A Business Plan
Any good proposition you send your boss’s way should be professionally presented, and training initiatives are no different. To convince your boss to invest in eLearning, a worthy business plan should focus on the shortcomings with your current method of training (if any) and how these can be rectified by implementing eLearning into the workplace.
If you’ve had particularly poor results in certain areas of the business, this is the opportune time to present them. Highlight exactly how eLearning can rectify these issues and build the staff and company to its highest performance level yet.
3. Show Them The Statistics
- The online corporate market will continue to grow through 2017, with a massive 77 percent of American companies already offering online corporate training to their staff.
- eLearning increases retention rates by at least 25 percent, giving your employer peace of mind that their training efforts will not have gone to waste.
- Staff are able to learn up to five times more information than they could in a standard training session while retaining the information just as well or better.
- 42 percent of companies in America believe that by utilizing e-learning initiatives, they’ve been able to increase their revenue.
4. Money Talks
Show your boss the figures, including everything from the time saved by not sitting in a learning classroom all day while their desks go unattended, to the costs of hiring expensive trainers only to find the information is lost by the very next day. Use real life examples of previous costs the company has incurred by implementing outdated training initiatives and how these have fallen short.
A report released by IBM in 2014 highlighted just how much money can be saved by implementing an eLearning program rather than relying on traditional methods. Every $1 a company spends on this type of training will net them a profit of $30 in productivity, which is a 50 percent boost in productivity from before.
5. Focus On The Staff
Any good employer knows that their company is only as good as the staff in it, and keeping your staff happy and engaged is crucial to the overall success of the organization. With a new generation of employees cropping up who focus on these modern technologies, it’s never been more urgent to invest in something that will appeal to all ages.
A report from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) found that companies who invest in training their staff have a massive 218 percent higher income per employee than those who don’t, or offer very little.
Offering modern and relevant training to your staff will keep them engaged and make them feel valued within the workplace. With happier and motivated staff, the company is the one to feel the effects with a higher profit margin and more harmonious workplace.
Still not convinced to invest in eLearning? Don’t give up hope just yet. Sometimes when a business has been run a certain way for so long it can take some time to shift the collective thought of the company. Continue to pepper your boss with facts and data about the achievements possible with eLearning, and enlist the help of other staff to be your cheerleaders. Sooner or later they’re bound to come to the party, and they’ll only have to thank you for the eventual success.
