The Importance of a Professional Trainer

Professional trainers can seem like a waste of money when compared to the cost of simply borrowing a manager from some other place in the organization. When you add up the costs in terms of wages and benefits and compare it to the costs of a few weeks of labor borrowed from another department they don't compare. Despite this wide difference there are a number of reasons why you should consider hiring a professional trainer if you plan on doing a reasonable amount of follow up.

Most of us have sat in a classroom or two where we were bored out of our minds. We were so bored that we doodled, talked to our classmates and chewed on our pencils. As the lecturer continued to talk, our minds drifted to other parts of the world, and other more appealing activities. No matter how much we tried we couldn't remember anything in the class. We didn't learn anything!

Each year hundreds of thousands of people might attend training within the U.S. On each of those employees the companies might spend wages and benefits making the cost of training pretty high. Let us say that you work in a company with 2,000 employees and each of those employees spent at least two hours a year in training. Assuming that the average wage was around $13 per hour with a $7 per hour benefits cost you might find that $20 X 2,000 employees X 2= $80,000 a year. If they learn nothing then you wasted $80,000 for nothing. To find the true cost you would need to add up the labor of the manager you borrowed and the loss of resources you borrowed him or her from.

Of course not all costs can so easily be calculated. You might also need to add up the cost in terms of lost productivity and competitiveness of employees who were day dreaming instead of learning skills that would help the company succeed. This cost is nearly incalculable but could potentially be worth millions of dollars. It has been said that a well constructed training program could be worth as much as 300% of any investment in it.

A strong trainer is worth his or her weight in gold. With experience a trainer will know how to use all of the classroom methods of helping people remember key concepts, will speak in a voice they can hear, will interact with the class to maintain their attention, and will give relevant examples to give the students context. The cost of $40,000 to $60,000 for someone to train and keep all of the administrative records pales in the face of the cost of not having a competent trainer.