Luzader & Co. is a full-service training and development company offering workshops, consultation, and Training Materials. Classroom Instruction: It is the cornerstone of all business training and development - it is very effective and conducive to almost any topic. By allowing learners, or "human capital" (the newest buzz word for people) to interact with the instructor, students are enabled to ask questions and receive immediate answers from the instructor. Likewise, the instructor can facilitate group activities or discussions to get creative juices flowing. Learners have the advantage of being in an environment that allows peer-to-peer counsel, providing the opportunity for people to draw on each other's experience. Overall, classroom instruction is clearly an effective way to train and educate your management, staff, investors and even your customers.

However, there are drawbacks. Classroom training is typically expensive, thereby impacting your operating expense dramatically. Even more difficult is trying to quantify the costs of the classroom training in relation to the benefits gained. In fact, it is so difficult to track, that many companies do not even attempt to monitor the expense or control the costs. It is important to remember that there is a lot more associated with in- person training than just the salary of your training staff. There are costs involved in procuring/producing training materials, costs of developing and maintaining a training facility, as well as travel and hotel expenses of employees who come from out of town for training. But perhaps the biggest and hardest to measure cost is that of reduction in productivity while your employees are seated in the classroom.

Internet or On-line Training: Internet training is gaining momentum. It is running a close second behind classroom training. As the business world continues to evolve and integrate more technology and fast pace business applications, the value of the online training solution becomes more and more apparent. On-line products can deliver training without the traditional associated expenses of classroom instruction. It can allow associates to complete training on their own time and you lose less in productivity. On-line training is a more effective distribution method for certain types of training and it opens up a global marketplace and outlet for training materials, which your company has already produced. On-line training is certainly the future and will continue to become more interactive and allow for more self-paced learning applications. It is a great option, allowing you to reach a larger audience for less!

Some company libraries will include training aids contained in nontraditional media such as video and web-casts. While these are very effective ways to train on certain systems or processes, they are also typically the more expensive ways of distributing information to learners. Most companies do not have a media engineer or video production expert on staff, but don't worry and don't rush out such persons, as there are alternatives. Today, authoring tools are making it easy for company management or trainers to produce high quality multimedia training aids. Anyone who is competent with powerpoint can produce a visually impressive presentation without having to be a media professional and without having to learn to write complicated programming code. These authoring tools also allow your business unit leaders to manage and produce their own internal training without having to get IT involved in the entire training project.