How VR Training and eLearning Can Reduce Training Time and Costs: 5 Hard-and-Fast Examples
Five Instances of Clear-Cut Profits and Increased Efficiency Delivered by Effective Digital Training Solutions
Whether in business or elsewhere, saving time and money is always the platinum standard for any initiative. Below, Roundtable Learning gives you five hard-and-fast examples of money and time saved through investments in workplace VR training and also investments in eLearning. In the middle, there’s an intermission discussing tips for communicating to your boss how choosing the right training solution for your learning objectives are key for long-term company objectives. And, of course, to ROI.
Let’s get to what you came here for. Training solutions like VR training and eLearning for the workplace can reduce the cost of workforce development:
How to Reduce Training Time and Costs with VR Training
Take a look at some dollars-and-cents examples of digital learning solutions thrift.
1. Award-Winning Children’s Hospital Halves the Cost of Neonatal Evacuation Training
- Company or agency: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
- Department or sector: Neonatal
- Improvement: $229.79 cut to $115.43 per person; reduced overall employee training costs in disaster preparedness modules for 300 neonatal nurses
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital was recently ranked number one by US News and World Report as the nation’s best children’s hospital. And medicine, more than most professions, has lifelong learning baked into it. As medical technology advances, learning technology is advancing along with it.
Through VR training programs, 300 nurses performed evacuations and other acute situations. Getting newborns out of harm’s way is, of course, an indispensable part of caring for the baby. The course itself was not the only requirement. Hospital regulations and disaster preparedness protocols add layers requiring FEMA and numerous other agencies to sign off.
Through a strategic and thoroughly vetted investment by this hospital system, all the red tape was cleared. The live training costs were compared, and the VR training costs were lower.
Over three years, the cost of training employees with an in-person workshop was double that of learning with VR. The upfront cost of VR hardware was fully offset after three years. Savings also came from having segmented training to keep the ward fully staffed.
2. Roundtable Learning Saves Company $1 mil. Off the Top in Training Costs
- Company or agency: Kellanova (foods; formerly of Kellogg’s)
- Department or sector: sales, stocking, distribution
- Improvement: closed a $1-mil-per-year, intermittently-used brick-and-mortar training facility
Kellanova is a snack-segment brand formerly owned by cereal and breakfast-food powerhouse Kellogg’s. The company’s historic city, Battle Creek, MI, housed a training facility that was a fully reconstructed grocery store used for onboarding new sales associates. Keeping shelves stocked with items year round in the most updated packaging and keeping the facility afloat year round was a costly expense for its minimal use – over $1 million dollars each year.
Every expert in consumer goods understands that competitive grocery stocking is a crucial sales strategy. Snack, soda, nut, cereal and other companies constantly leverage their sales and distribution personnel to jockey for better aisle placement or expanded product lines in every supermarket. Kellanova wanted to enact its proprietary sales training workshops without dropping one million bucks in overhead every year.
Through an in-depth, socially interactive VR headset training simulation, salespeople from Zoomers to Boomers could upsell and negotiate better conditions for household brands like Pringles and Cheez-It.
Roundtable’s successful creation of an immersive, interactive suite of sales negotiation training programs shows it’s not only physical, but kinetic and muscle-memory skills that VR training can teach. Soft skills and interpersonal skills are achieved through the immersive learning experience. Beyond the immediate savings of $1 million dollars into their annual budget, travel and related costs for the sales employee training program will undoubtedly drop significantly.
Partial List of Travel-Based Skills/Professional Training
- Cost for a domestic flight ($380)
- Cost for a hotel room in the US; per night, per person ($155)
- Wages during training
- Reduced output by trainer
Roundtable’s VR training for Kellanova has been nominated for a Brandon-Hall Award for best Advancement in AR/VR Training for 2024.
Intermission: Tips for Communicating the Financial and Real-World Upsides of Digital Training Solutions
Company or agency leadership have varying ideas about the real-world value of Learning and Development opportunities. This variance applies to all types of training solutions: eLearning, instructor-led training, VR training, even traditional classroom training. It will vary based on the company, what is being sold, and other factors.
However, there are two things leadership is always thinking about. Those are two things you can leverage to communicate the importance of investing in learning and development: long-term key business objectives and efficiency. (The stats listed in this article are also useful evidence that training solutions can work.)
Talking Points in Discussing Expenditures for eLearning and VR Training Costs
- To make the case for investing in eLearning, think about efficiency. If something can be produced at the same quality but in less time, that’s always good in the long term. The Association for Talent Development notes that business leaders are uniquely interested in the efficiency that something can bring.
- Some leaders get hung up on the cost of VR headsets. Here are some things to consider:
- Per unit, VR headsets are decreasing in price at a rate of 1% per year
- Headsets can serve dozens of employees any day of the week for around three years
- The resale market for headsets is always booming
- Offsets are a big factor, and here’s one: reining in travel expenses for in-person training. Xerox saved $150,000 by trimming a single event and reduced its travel budget for Europe by 10%. For Xerox, these savings came from the inventive use of the eLearning modality.
Older than Google, Roundtable Knows LEARNING
Roundtable Learning was founded in 1997. We’ve been in the broader training solutions and learning sector since before Google was founded. We are a comprehensive learning firm, offering everything from traditional modalities like eLearning, ILT, and VILT to immersive solutions including AR and VR, but that’s definitely not everything.
We offer instructional design and professional development consultation. In short, we’ve worked across the entire spectrum of expertise in learning experiences. And the focus is on learning, the core competency: almost one-fifth of our staff members are instructional designers or learning professionals.
Now, let’s explore how eLearning saves you time and money.
Saving Time and Money on Training Solutions with eLearning
3. Per Employee Training Costs Drop from $95 to $11
- Company or agency: Dow Chemical
- Departments or sectors: almost all employees
- Improvement: $95 drops to $11; per employee per course
Dow Chemical started its online training in 1999. A quarter-century ago, it began by augmenting the PeopleSoft HR management program. It then continued with a workplace compliance course and dove right in. According to consultancy Devlin-Peck, Dow’s aggregate saved $34 mil by implementing eLearning.
Savings – One HR Compliance Course for 40,000 Employees
- $162,000: manual records of completed lessons; saved
- $300,000: trainers and facilities; saved
- $1,000,000: course handouts; saved
- $1,200,000: salaries (training time reduced); saved
This global industry titan saw the results and moved forward by founding trade and talent pipeline training programs.
The prospect of saving one million dollars on printing paper packets will attract the attention of executives and leadership and will definitely be an attention-grabber for procurement.
Dow’s success highlights how scalability can be achieved within eLearning programs. Capturing the knowledge of subject matter experts (SMEs) and transforming it into an eLearning course or video provides a scalable solution that benefits many employees over time. While SME input is crucial, their expertise often comes with significant costs. By recording their insights and optimizing the content, organizations can create reusable training resources that eliminate the need for repeated expert involvement. This approach allows companies to invest in a one-time development process that maximizes the value of SME knowledge without continuously drawing on their time for future training sessions.
4. Digital Hardware Company Earns Back Full Training Cost in One Quarter
- Company or agency: Xerox
- Departments or sectors: almost all employees
- Improvement: $150,000 saved for the North American region and a 10% reduction in European travel budget
Business training costs used to involve a lot of travel. You could pay the trainer to come to you or pay for employees to travel. Either way, it would balloon the training budget and was a negotiable expense. For Xerox, travel could have been enormously expensive: with over 130,000 personnel they needed to train, on a global scale.
The goal of their training was to optimize customer service and engagement online. By creating custom eLearning content for all their learning paths, these hidden employee training costs were significantly reduced. The returns spanned two continents.
By covering all the material through eLearning, Xerox modified a single event and earned back the ROI in L&D within one quarter.
5. Seven Hours of Six Sigma Reduced to 135 Minutes
- Company or agency: Toshiba America Business Solutions
- Department or sector: marketing, distribution and sales
- Improvement: seven one-hour in-person sessions shrunk to three 45-minute eLearning modules
Learning paths can be tailored for a single department or scaled across multiple teams, showcasing one of the main benefits of digital training solutions. In this case, Toshiba leveraged this advantage to transform their training approach.
Toshiba had extensive training needs, covering topics such as compliance issues, selling strategies, new product launches, product instructions, and network support. Complicating matters further, these training programs had to be accessible across a vast region, including the US, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America—spanning from Anchorage to Costa Rica. Their training relied on Six Sigma principles, known for driving workplace improvement.
To meet these challenges, Toshiba transitioned from a seven-hour in-person training format to a fully eLearning-based approach. They developed three self-paced online modules, each lasting 45 minutes, resulting in a total training time of just over two hours. This shift significantly reduced the training duration while maintaining comprehensive content coverage.
The move to eLearning boosted talent development and even led to increased enrollments in non-mandatory courses, highlighting the effectiveness and appeal of the new digital training solution.
Making it Count: Roundtable Learning
Investing in modern training solutions like VR training and eLearning isn’t just about cost-cutting; it’s about making strategic improvements that drive long-term success. When a company takes a traditional, time-consuming training program and reimagines it with digital tools, the result can be a transformative shift in learning effectiveness and resource management.
This strategic shift not only enhances the efficiency of workforce development but also supports broader organizational objectives like improving employee performance, reducing turnover, and maintaining high operational standards. With the right digital training program in place, companies can cultivate a culture of continuous learning that contributes to both immediate gains and sustainable growth over time.
By looking beyond upfront costs and focusing on long-term ROI, decision-makers can appreciate that investing in cutting-edge training solutions is not an expense—it’s an investment in the future of their business.