The average cost to replace an employee starts at around 50% of annual salary and can be as much as 200% in some industries according to about.com’s Darrell Zahorsky. So with that said, why aren’t bells and whistles being sounded in every small to medium sized business (SMB) CEO’s office about the training challenge? The truth is - historically there haven’t been a lot of options for the SMBs navigating the challenging and treacherous waters of business success for organized training programs.
The Fortune 500, with their deep pockets has long invested in training, knowing the value of the investment. According to Michael Porter “industries that spend the most on employee development and training are typically the most competitive in every developed country in the world”. But let’s face it, SMBs don’t have a ton of excess cash on hand even when they are in expansion mode and the market has been oddly void of low cost training solutions that harness the power of today’s technology.
SMBs make do with “peer to peer” training, annual training seminars, training reimbursement programs, and antiquated paper based training systems. Many have no formal training programs at all. Some survive; many more would survive and even flourish if they could overcome the high costs of employee turnover with a low cost and effective training program.
With the advancement of technology one would think that affordable online training platforms would have hit the SMB market addressing this need, but the Training and Development marketplace is still chasing Fortune 500 dollars. In their desire to protect market share amongst the cash cows with deep pockets, the industry has created intricate barriers to block entry for competition, and unwittingly locked out millions of potential clients through utilizing an overly complex and outdated content compliance standard (SCORM), which facilitates high instructional design fees, and expensive complex software packages. Frankly, the current Training and Development marketplace doesn’t think there is enough money in the SMB market to service it, so it keeps things complex to protect the business elite.
The SMB market deserves better. The corporate Training and Development market needs to evolve at a faster pace, reduce costs, and become more inclusive. This can only be done through breaking down the industry barriers that created a market of complexity and confusion, and start to service the market place with simplicity and clarity. In reality, most SMB’s can create effective, low cost, easy to use training solutions if they were given a platform in which to do so. Training your people does not need to be rocket science. So for those of us at LearningZen.com we say give the people (SMBs) the tools to control their own content, people, and processes, and let the training revolution begin!