Marketing training benefits

As an organisation you need to understand what motivates an employer to train. Employers are more likely to see the merits of training where it provides workers with skills required in their current jobs including supporting the introduction of new equipment or software, or to meet legal obligations such as health and safety regulations or to improve business performance. A business case solely based on the delivery of qualifications or meeting future skills needs is less likely to be attractive to them.

It is important to ensure that your marketing materials and activities promote the benefits of training and reflect the identified needs of businesses locally and address sector needs, rather than what you as a provider can offer. Benefits of training could be seen as a return on investment as trained employees tend to perform better and have increased levels of motivation (they feel valued) or improved staff retention, saving the employer time as recruitment, induction and training are expensive in terms of advertising costs and staff time.

The marketing materials that promote your training and services to employers should outline the benefits in an easy to read, user friendly and jargon free way.

It is important you understand and are aware of sector differences in respect of workforce development. Some sectors are more likely to embrace training, therefore develop systems and practices that enable the systematic collection and use by staff of LMI (external information) and Management Information data (internal information) to inform the business case within each sector.

Another important factor to consider when marketing training benefits is the size of the employer. The size of an organisation will effect how it responds to workforce learning and the essential characteristics of small firms must be a key consideration when developing marketing materials for learning opportunities in small companies. For example SMEs are more likely to support informal learning through in house training opportunities, SMEs in the professional, business and service sector are more likely to perceive the need to train than in other sectors, micro businesses are less likely to buy NVQs and long term government training packages.

Your materials and marketing activities need to reflect that you recognise employers’ likely barriers to training and that these are removed. Consider objections such as a lack of a perceived need to train established employees, loss of work time, financial constraints, deficiencies in the availability, quality and location of training, appropriateness of government training packages to meeting the needs of employers with less than 20 employees. In your materials you can show how you can overcome this with ideas such as use of public funding as a subsidy within a total training package that enables a reduction in total cost to the employer that will also enable a total business training solution to be offered, identify flexible training solutions and promote a “can do” approach, base programme design on a diagnosis of needs of the business, work role and individuals.

It is also worth noting external assessment of your provision on your materials e.g. that the provision you offer has been assessed by ALI or OFSTED as good or excellent.

Materials

Case Study (2) | Guide (2) |

Case Study (Showing 2 of 2 available)

•   Promoting the benefits of training to employers  (296 KB)
  Released: 07/02/2008 Downloadable file
  Preston College's employer engagement team investigated employers' perceptions of the benefits of training and adapted their promotional materials accordingly.
  
•   Marketing the benefits of training to employers -project  (312 KB)
  Released: 24/08/2007 Downloadable file
  Eight training providers looked at ways of getting across the business case for learning to employers. This report describes how they went about it and their findings.
  

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Guide (Showing 2 of 2 available)

•   Product guides for business clients  (211 KB)Downloadable file
  This guide provides a template for course staff contributing information for marketing materials for employers on courses relevant to their employees.
  
•   Product guides for business clients: sample flier  (68 KB)Downloadable file
  A flier promoting the NVQ in IT User qualification produced by Colleges for Business Norfolk. See separate guide for generating content.
  

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