Everyone needs some help learning how to do something from time to time. Learning how to tie your shoes. Learning how to ride a bike, learning to swim. Or even learning how not to act at the office holiday party. These are the kinds of things we learn from our parents, older siblings, and friends (and in the case of the last example, our bosses). Good lessons, all of them.
Companies learn how to do things by hiring smart people and paying them to figure out how things are done. Sometimes, even after they figure it out for themselves, they hire other companies to do the work for them. In either case, what needs to be figured out gets figured out, and what needs to get done ultimately does.
But what happens when the smart people don’t have the time or knowledge required to figure out how to do what needs to get done? Simple, you hire someone else to do the work, right? Well, what if that too is not an option? Ignore the need and hope it goes away?
No, of course not. If you don’t have the time or knowledge to complete the task yourself and you can’t outsource the work itself, why not consider outsourcing training that will give your smart people, well, even more smarts?
It’s an attractive compromise for a few reasons:
-
Lower overall cost. It’s generally less costly overall to pay for the training required to perform the work than it is to pay for the work itself.
-
Job and requirements-specific training. These might sound like buzzwords or jargon, but there’s a real point here and this can make a huge difference on the true effectiveness of your training. In our world of content development for example, we would much rather offer training on the use of Frame Maker as it applies directly to the performance and within the context of an individual’s day-to-day job, not as an overview to the sum total capabilities of the software. With outsourcing of the training you have the huge advantage of ensuring the training is 100% applicable to your process and your content. The significance of this distinction cannot be overstated.
-
No long-term commitment to outsourcing. When you target the training you need specifically to your unique requirements, it takes less time to train overall since the objectives of the training are very clear and understood up front. No time is wasted covering irrelevant material. It can be everything you want and nothing you don’t, and this means less redundancy and cost. Once the training has been completed and you now have the skills you need to complete what needs to get done, there’s no commitment to further expenditures on outsourcing, unless you decide you want additional training.
Another way to look at it, (and I’ll apologize in advance for the terribly overused cliché), when you have to get something done would you rather pay for a fish, or learn to fish for yourself?
Outsourcing can be both an incredibly cost-effective and efficient way of getting additional work done without adding the cost of new equipment, software, or additional talent. At the same time, outsourcing can be looked upon negatively in that it can sometimes mean that a job that could potentially be done internally is now going to be outsourced. But it doesn’t have to. There is a middle ground through targeted skills training, and its worth looking into.
