That’s a question often asked on one or two of the training forums I occasionally visit. Unfortunately, the question falls into the unknowable category as does the question, ‘How long is a piece of string?’ Equally unfortunate is that respondents give answers that are wild guesses; they have ranged from 40 hours per hour of training to various nominal percentages over the last six months.
As human beings, we like to put everything into quantifiable or qualitative boxes… neat little boxes with familiar, convenient dimensions. We can feel safe and secure with quantities or qualities that we can understand and control. It is of course true that we also have to face the practical necessity of assigning costs to activities, and therefore we need to know how long these activities take. We need to know how much we should pay a specialist to develop a program. At best, there is always a large element of guesswork. Guesswork occurs due to the large number of variables that are added to any instructional design activity. For example, how much content needs to be covered to achieve the learning outcomes of the program? What is the expected acceptance rate by the proposed audience? How will it be delivered (interventions for classroom delivery are less labor intensive than, for example, e-learning designs)?
There are not only the structural variables, there are also variables related to the instructional designer or the design team. People with extensive content knowledge in a specific area can produce stepped instruction much more easily than someone with less extensive knowledge. Often, it is necessary to identify one or more subject matter experts to tell instructional designers how content knowledge, skills, or attitudes are applied in workplaces.
My experience has been that while it is almost impossible to determine precisely how long it will take to develop a training activity (a substance activity), there are a few ways in which a more reliable estimate can be made. Some of the following methods might help.
Based on past experience, calculate costs in averages or work in maximums. That is, if it took 10 hours on average to design a variety of instructional programs, it is a reasonable proposition that it will take about 10 hours to design something similar. When estimating, it is always better to err on the side of higher cost. Therefore, instead of using average times for development, if you use maximums, your calculations may have some lag clearance. If you were considering averaging, you would choose the maximum duration from the list of programs that are used to calculate the average and use it.
It is also possible to allocate the hours and then design the instruction to fit the time available. This can be risky, but it’s not as unprofessional as it may seem at first. Let’s say, for example, that an hour has been allocated for everyone in an organization to receive an update on occupational health and safety issues. Perhaps a suitable delivery strategy could be to do a ‘show and tell’ with a brochure provided at the end for further consolidation. I have always held the view that ‘chalk and talk’ presentation methods are not ‘training’ because they lack a form of evaluation; we do not know if the participants have learned what was intended. However, sometimes this type of presentation can be useful, and it’s hard to argue that people don’t leave with knowledge they didn’t have when they arrived.
A third method is to ask someone who has completed a similar project how long it took. This can be a rough guide, but it’s often more helpful than guessing for no real reason to do so.
As a training manager, when I calculated my annual budget, I included a lump sum figure for development if I did it separately, or included a charge on my training delivery costs of, say, 25%. The bulk development figure was a maximum he had calculated on previous design activities. My team would often overspend on one activity and underspend on the next, and when the budget ran out, we had the option of canceling other planned training activities and redirecting funds, no more activities for the year, or submitting a business case. to our Finance Department for additional funds.
So the message of this article is not to blindly follow the hours, percentages, or other information that people put out on training forums, often with such conviction that they are ‘standard’, ‘industry accepted’ or whatever. stuff. Do your own research and come up with estimates that track the sets of variables that exist in your internal and external environments.
A well thought out training proposal (or outline) can be a great help in estimating development costs because it focuses on the facts, eg target audience, learning outcomes, training duration, delivery method and much more. This is the data that informs your instructional design team. An added bonus is that if a funding delegate approves your training proposal, it’s more likely that your design and development estimate will also be approved.
Published May 2005. Copyright Robin Henry 2005