This November, together with WSB’s team we were doing a recap of this work year, and we decided to do a small, but very important survey called “The state of training management survey 2020” by gathering information from training companies. It was important for us to understand how this year’s events, the COVID-19 pandemic and the forced isolation of the majority of the population have impacted the market and the business processes of various companies. This information was important to us because we are making a product that takes into account the entirety of the processes of organizing and carrying out trainings. We also believe that knowing the results would be useful not only to us, but to everyone who is interested in the state of the industry.
The State of Training Management 2020 Research download free pdf copy
Who took part in the survey?
We offered managers and executives of training companies from all over the world to participate in the survey, and some of them agreed.
In order to understand how big their business is we asked them to share with us the approximate number of trainers they work with and the number of classes they have per month.
We were able to determine that the average training company employs no more than 20 trainers and on average there are 1.5 – 2 classes per trainer per month. If one trainer is involved in more than 2 training sessions per month, then on average this trainer can be considered more productive than 80% of the trainers in this survey.
Time spent on management during the pandemic
Classes
Training management requires a considerable time investment. It was important for us to understand whether the process has changed due to most training now being held online, and employees working from home.
Just like we thought, the time to manage a single training increased for almost half of the respondents. Nevertheless, it can be considered a good result that the pandemic has not impacted the performance (at least in this regard) of almost 1/3 of the companies, and that 18% of the respondent have actually reported a decrease in the time required for managing a training. We can only hope that it happened due to the introduction of more efficient practices and not due to a decrease in the number of students.
On the other hand, the time spent on managing classes was actually an unpleasant surprise for us. Almost 25% of the companies spend up to 7 hours per day on routine tasks. Considering that a work day is typically 8 hours long, this leaves little time for the work that’s supposed to be the main focus of the company - teaching students. What WSB considers a good time spent on routine tasks (less than an hour per day) was reported only by 36% of the respondents.
Attendees
The most important part of every training is the person that attends it. In light of this, should we consider the time spent to handle one attendee wasted, even if it takes many hours? This is a rhetorical question. But we would like to note that only 1% of the responding companies take over 3 hours to process 1 incoming request. Most respondents do it in around 1 hour. Is this a good time? We think it is. Workshop Butler users, however, spend 15 minutes per attendee.
As you can see from the chart on the right, the pandemic has not had a significant impact. In our opinion, the reason for this is that processes such as registrations, sending mail and issuing invoices were done online anyways, and thus did not change.
What about classes?
As we have mentioned before, due to objective reasons most processes that are traditionally done offline are now being done online. This has impacted virtually all аctivity areas, from rock concerts to Thanksgiving family gatherings. As for online workshops, they have proven more successful than online proms on Zoom. We wanted to know whether the trend of switching to online education will continue after the pandemic restrictions are dropped.
Little wonder that more than half of the companies intend to continue to employ online education due to the advantages it brings, which were described in detail by WSB’s founder Sergey Kotlov in his “COVID-19 Influence on State of Training Management” blog post.
Instruments
Our professional interest, of course, included the issue of various training management tools (after all, we are developing one such tool!). We wanted to know what tools our respondents use, how many tools they use and whether these programs are adjusted to the needs of training companies. We asked a number of questions on the stages of the training organization process that we consider the most important (based on the information we receive from our users).
More than half of the registrations happen via email. This surprised us, considering that emails often get lost, and in this case losing an email means losing a customer.
Built-in website forms are a more modern solution, even considering that in 90% of the cases, the information is sent to a mailbox in the end, except for some smart integrated solutions like WSB. In this case, all the information is directly sent to a CRM, and managers don’t have to sort through it manually like those 7% of respondents that still prefer Google Forms.
And while we were on the topic of electronic mail that tends to get lost and can also take up a lot of your time, we asked our respondents how many emails they send per student. Turns out, it’s mostly 2–4 emails per attendee, which is a lot of work, and, let’s be honest, it’s also tiresome and quite boring.
By the way, this is why WSB automates mail sending.
Automated mail sending-out helps you save a lot of time and energy and improves the student’s experience, too. Handling mail is a simple task, yet unsolved by many companies.
Certificates
Over 70% of the companies that took part in the survey send certificates to their attendees in the end. This is a useful practice that works on many levels. It is important for students to have material confirmation of the knowledge they have received, and a good way for companies to promote themselves, since people generally like to post their certificates on social networks and elsewhere. Nevertheless, generating and sending out a certificate is often not as simple as it seems.
Then again, just like for most WSB users, for 70% of the companies in this survey it takes no more than 10 minutes. We hope they didn’t forget to automate certificate sending.
Payments
100% of the trainers we know like to teach students and change the views of people, making their life easier and their work more productive. But business is business, and of course payment processing is important. Of course, we didn’t ask specifically how much our respondents make, instead we asked how they accept payments. Here’s what we learned.
Feedback
Companies that work with WSB claim that testimonials are the best driver for sales. If you can get feedback from a training participant and get permission to use it for promotional purposes, this will definitely have a positive impact on consecutive sales. This is why it is important to organize feedback. Only 18% of the companies responded that they receive feedback from almost all participants of their trainings. This means that over 80% of companies do not use this powerful tool to boost their sales. Why? Maybe the reason is in the way feedback is requested.
We don’t know for sure how a student decides whether they want to give feedback or not, but we are certain that you should strive to make feedback gathering as automated as possible while still targeting 100% of your audience. Such functions are offered by WSB.
But even this is not enough, and this is why in the near future we plan to modernize this service and add instant conversion of a feedback message into a pretty testimonial that will then appear on the training’s website.
We will tell you more about this feature later.
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