Seven benefits of digital transformation for training providers

There are many benefits to making digital changes in your training business, but that doesn’t mean it will be straightforward. See the process as a learning curve – approach it with curiosity and a willingness to grow and you will reap the rewards.

Ultimately, digital transformation should enable you to improve your offering to key stakeholders. This could be your customers, employees, partners, shareholders, or a combination of these.

As the name suggests, digital transformation is all about change. To make the change work for you, start with clear reasons why you’re doing it. For example, do you want to make your trainers’ lives easier, increase efficiency in a specific area of operations or reduce costs?

This is about setting clear objectives that will benefit your business and then identifying the ways that technology can help you achieve your aims. Start with the ‘why’ and let technology be the enabler to keep the focus firmly on the outcomes.

You can read more in the series here:

• What is digital transformation and how can it help you?
• How to get your team on board with digital transformation

Here are our top seven ways that digital transformation can benefit training providers.

1. Increased efficiency

Efficiency is often the key reason that training businesses look to new digital solutions. Why? Because efficiency can be improved by ensuring the data you collect from each area of your business is joined up, streamlining your workflow, reducing bottlenecks and improving accuracy.

Perhaps you’re looking to speed up your onboarding process by reducing the number of human touch points needed to validate the eligibility of candidates? Or maybe you want to streamline the way that learners are issued tasks and activities and outcomes recorded?

A digital transformation project should automate all of these steps, helping to reduce the amount of time required by trainers and freeing them up to concentrate on other tasks

2. Improved learner experience

A successful business is nothing without its customers, so as an apprenticeship and skills training provider it pays to work hard at improving your learner experience.

Remember that young learners have grown up using technology in every area of their lives. Not only will they expect your products and processes to be progressive, they may disengage if they aren’t.

3. Faster, more reliable data capture

How much time is currently spent manually running reports or checking data is accurate before you can make a decision?

By introducing fully integrated technologies, such as Bud, that provide a single stream of data, key information instantly becomes more accessible. Your data can be automatically pulled into dynamic dashboards, offering real-time accurate reporting that you can access on any device.

Moving to a joined-up platform gives you a clear, more accurate, picture of what’s going on across your organisation. And this means you have a head start when you need to adjust your strategy or pivot your operations.

Janette Healey, Head of Apprenticeships at Raise the Bar, found that switching to Bud’s digital platform helped to make data more accurate.

4. Reduced costs

It’s common for organisations to write off digital transformation projects due to a perception that they’ll be too costly.

Take a step back and look at the bigger picture; that initial financial outlay could actually help to save you money in a number of ways:

1. Replace old with new. It’s often more expensive to maintain several old systems compared to replacing them with one new system that serves a variety of purposes.
2. Do more with less. This goes back to the efficiency point above. Working out ways to reduce employee time on repetitive tasks will lower your staff costs and other overheads.
3. Greater capacity. Take the example of remote learning. By enabling larger groups to learn together, each trainer can deliver their course to a higher number of learners, reducing the overall delivery cost.

5. Increased profitability

Research shows that it pays to embrace new technology. According to a study by the SAP Center for Business Insights and Oxford Economics, 80% of businesses that completed digital transformation projects reported increased profits.

On top of that, 85% increased their market share and leaders said they expected their revenue growth to be 23% higher on average.

For training providers, the opportunity here is all about improving scalability , reducing business risk whilst enabling growth and increasing profitability.

With Bud, the learner can manage enrolment themselves remotely, reducing the time it takes trainers to onboard them and ensuring everything’s in place from the outset. And that means you can get more learners onto the system much quicker.

Additionally, a digital system enables you to provide accurate data and evidence within your learners’ ILR, ensuring that no payments get delayed.

6. Better preparation for Ofsted

Ofsted inspections are stressful at the best of times, but relying on old systems that don’t talk to one another adds an extra level of complexity to the process.

A digital platform, such as Bud, will simplify your processes for collecting and storing learner data. It will also make it much easier for Ofsted inspectors to instantly access the evidence they require, on every learner they wish to view.

For Sarah van der Merwe, Head of Apprenticeships at The Learning Enterprise, having learner data in one place proved invaluable during her recent Ofsted inspection.

7. Making your employees’ jobs easier

Having access to the right information and the best tools and processes makes life much easier. And that leads to happier managers and trainers who stick around.

It’s your job to listen to your team’s needs and research digital solutions to their day-to-day problems. This will ensure the system you choose to onboard will reduce their frustrations, and tick off some of the other benefits mentioned, such as improving efficiency.

Are you ready for digital transformation?

Bud’s digital platform helps to deliver benefits like these to apprenticeship and skills training providers.

In addition to Bud being a transformative platform, the key to our success is providing the right level of support for each customers’ needs. Through years of experience of onboarding new customers, we’ve learned that a one-size-fits-all approach is not enough. That’s why Bud now has two levels of implementation: Core and Enhanced.

Core gives you everything you need to get set up with the basics of Bud; Enhanced provides an extra level of expert support to guide you through the digital transformation process.

Download our free business health check tool to analyse your resources and decide on the level of support you need or find out more about how Bud can support you every step of the way in your digital transformation project.