In some organizations, employee training is seen as an unnecessary expense. Once an employee has a basic understanding of the role, why invest more time and resources into that employee’s development?

When you as an employer or your Senior management team are considering paying for an employee to complete a course, it’s important that there’s a sound business case to justify what’s going to be a significant investment, in terms of finances, time resources and professional support for the employee and whether this is worth it in terms of how it will benefit and give back to the business.

In the current economic climate, it’s no secret that most businesses simply won’t have the same disposable income to spend on staff training and qualifications that they might previously have done. 

This may leave you with a dilemma as an employer, if you’re looking to get an employee/s up to speed in marketing or management, you might be seeking a professional certificate or diploma to enroll them on. However, if you’re faced with slightly more limited funds at the moment, you might feel you can’t afford to pay for a premium product and be tempted to go for the easy solution and choose the cheapest professional course you can find.

STOP.

Take a minute to think.

It might seem counterintuitive but sometimes the option that appears ‘cheapest’ at first glance, isn’t actually the cheapest after all, both in terms of literal price and value for money and also cost to your valuable time and energy and resources.

There’s many extra expenses that can be incurred from choosing a potentially substandard product which end up making the seemingly ‘great deal’ more expensive in the long term.

Zig Ziglar, an American businessman and best selling sales advice author, used the purchase of a bike as an example. You can pay less initially for a bike but then inevitably end up shelling out more and more for repairs as it isn’t built to last, or you can pay that little bit extra to begin with and get a quality product.

Often when we’re purchasing a product or service, we look at the stated price, the initial investment, and take it at face value, without understanding the true ‘cost’.

Here’s why you should pay the higher price now, to avoid cost later and why the ‘cheapest deal’ isn’t always cheapest.

Counterintuatively, a cheaper course can eat into your training and resource budget as an employer far more than its seemingly more expensive counterpart. It might sound obvious, but Cheaper courses are often cheaper for a reason! Less expensive courses are unlikely to have invested as much in creating top learning materials and bonus content and may not be able to offer the same level of learning resources and extra content that a more expensive provider would.

They even may not actually provide the necessary materials, equipment, and supplies needed for the student to properly benefit from and complete the course.

You may end up paying extra and eating into your budget further or redistributing existing resources that are needed elsewhere, to provide the employee with the extra learning materials or technology and resources to really develop the skills you need them to from the course. For example subscriptions to sites like Hubspot or Management Direct to give them the content they need for their learning, meaning you suddenly end up paying more in the long term anyway.

In contrast, ‘seemingly’ more expensive courses are often charging a little more because they’re putting significant expenditure into creating top quality resources that the learner can utilise beyond the course and take back to their business, for example they might offer their own custom built learning platform and resource area containing marketing and management templates, ebooks, video content etc which you can access longer term and utilise for the benefit of your business.

As well as this, more expensive marketing and management courses may be accredited by respected organisations like the Chartered Management Instittue and Chartered Institute of Marketing and include membership to these organisations for your employee, meaning your organisation benefits from access to an even greater selection of expert industry insights and resources and even connections with other prominent marketers or managers through their membership networks.

Securing resources to help the employee learn properly in the course and therefore in their role will often necessitate the additional value of more expensive providers with better developed courses that you can be sure will provide the tools your employee needs.

Less expensive providers are unlikely to have recruited industry professionals to help design their courses or to have consulted with experts to develop the most up to date and relevant marketing or management training content. They also may not have as much experience in delivering qualifications or specialise in teaching marketing or management.

Therefore, if you’re relying on this qualification to train a new marketing employee from scratch for example, or help a long term employee learn entirely new skills; going with what turns out to be essentially a substandard product, could leave you with an employee who still does not fully understand the industry. 

In nearly every industry, but particularly marketing and management, technology and trends respectively evolve quickly, so employees’ skills must be constantly updated to keep up with the fast pace of innovation. 

And with the advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution, speed of application of new knowledge will be critical. Making sure employees are keeping up with the required knowledge for their role and that they can functionally apply such knowledge in the workplace is extremely important.

With a cheaper less well developed course, despite having supposedly undertaken a professional qualification, they still may not be taught the ins and outs of the most new and relevant areas of marketing or management and therefore not be fully versed on what will be expected of them in their role. You may end up shelling out for your employee to take this course, only to realise that it hasn’t actually helped them develop the most relevant skills you need from them.

You will then end up having to spend more time and potentially money, explaining things to them yourself and giving them extra in-house training or even paying for them to take yet another more in depth course.

In contrast, by paying a little extra up front and going with a supposedly more expensive course (which probably is only more expensive because it benefits from more years of experience and powerful partnerships with accreditors like the CIM), you can be assured that your money is going to do what you need it to.

If you work in the industry you’ll probably already know that study centres accredited by organisations like the CIM, work closely with these accreditors and industry experts to design the most up to date content and have to pass rigorous tests to ensure their training is relevant and of a high standard.

What’s more, many CIM modules for example, are assessed by work-based assignments, meaning the learners have to use the business they’re working for as a kind of case study and apply their knowledge to produce real life analysis on that business. So for example, if you sent an employee on a CIM course, your organisation would benefit by getting practical documents containing relevant, ready to be implemented strategy around your business! 

Knowledge is arguably useless in marketing or management, without the application of it in

practice to achieve a desired result. Developing your employees skills throughout their marketing or management career and mapping these to industry requirements will help you maintain staff who have competent and coherent knowledge in their roles. 

With a mo