I travel the country talking to RTOs about their businesses and the trends they see. Thus, my comments are drawn from their experiences at the coalface and my extrapolation of them.
For example:
- It seems RTOs agree that there is a significant upturn in business
- Trainers are getting harder to find
- Trainers cost more
These reasons are why I am visiting so many RTOs. They need to be able to do more with less and to become more scalable. A couple of you were talking about quitting your admin roles and joining the training pool – for $500/day plus UOC bonuses. Not bad, eh? 🙂
JWGecko Training Management Tools are here to help. Besides what you may have seen on our site, we have a lot more coming your way. Meanwhile, here are some steps you can take right now:
- Let students do their own paperwork: Having online enrolment is not simply about taking orders while you sleep or improving cash-flow by enabling online credit card transactions. It is also about shifting admin functions back to the client. This improves data quality and speeds up processing. One of our clients has increased its business by 30% without an increase in administration staff, simply by adding online enrolment and confirmation.
- Deliver theory elements of a course online: This means that there is less face-to-face teaching time, thereby reducing the trainer’s time commitment to that needed to teach the elements they probably enjoy most. It also reduces students’ time away from the office and means that you can provide more competitive pricing.
- AQTF 2010 has a requirement to allow students to be able to access data stored by you. To comply with this requirement, you can either add manual systems and processes or you can allow students to log-on to your website and see, and update, their own data. Using the same technology, employers can review their staff’s bookings, progress and results without your teams needing to do anything.
Even 18 months ago, it could have been argued that use of technology would provide a point of difference between RTOs. While this might still be true to some extent, it is mostly about staying competitive by using resources wisely in order to improve scalability while reducing fixed costs.
