Training Your Staff on a Budget

We’re currently facing a huge cost of living crisis and teetering on the brink of what could be the longest recession since records began, so it’s hardly surprising that charities in particular are feeling the pinch. According to BlackBaud’s the Status of UK fundraising Report, 32% of non-profit organisations saw a decrease in their income in the last twelve months. And when times are tough, the training budget is usually one of the first things to be cut. So how do you manage training your staff on a budget?

Providing learning and development  programmes costs money, and this can be a real stretch for small charities in particular. Just the loss of a member of staff for the period of their training can have a profound impact—let alone the hard costs of residential courses, travel or external trainers.

Still, skimp on providing learning and development—and risk losing your best people

Good people don’t stay in jobs as long as they once did. One study revealed employees who feel that their skills are not being put to good use in their current job are 10 times more likely to be looking for a new job than those who feel that their skills are being put to good use. If workers feel like they’ve plateaued, they can grow bored with the role and lack of training and development feeds into this.

This is a particular problem for charities as they’re unlikely to pay as much as the private (or public) sectors and really can’t afford to lose people through boredom or lack of career development.

So, put bluntly, if your charity fails to invest in people who show enterprise and a desire to learn, you risk losing the good ones and only holding on to less able staff.

But how do you train your staff on a budget? How do you make sure you accrue all the benefits that come from developing your teams—like the acquisition of important new skills, improved performance, staff morale and retention—while not putting the urgent work of the charity at risk?

Prioritise and build a long-term plan

Slashing a percentage off your training budget without scrutinising how you’re allocating spend and what you’ll lose can create a false economy.

Instead, build a longer-term plan that establishes priorities over time; one based on what’s essential versus what’s desirable. To do this, you need to understand the business case for specific training so that you can then make informed decisions about what to keep, cut or postpone for another year.

This plan should also incorporate input from your team’s own training plans.

Involve your staff in creating personalised training plans/wish lists

This is another way to make sure training is prioritised. And it stops you wasting money with a one-size-fits-all approach that allocates the same training for all job functions/teams.

Kick it off by asking your staff to complete a training request form in which they outline what they think they’d gain from specific training, how they’d use it to improve their work and how, in turn, this could benefit the charity.

Since this is about budget-cutting, everyone should be encouraged to think of it as a live document; so that it’s a flexible plan to include not only paid-for courses but other options like work shadowing, mentoring, job rotations, online training, etc.

It can then be reviewed at regular, diarised, meetings and should form part of the appraisal process.

So, what are the options for training your staff on a budget?

1. Mentoring or job shadowing

Can you offer your staff opportunities for mentoring or job-shadowing within the charity? Or, do you have a close association with another organisation that you could collaborate with on this? CharityConnect networking events are a great way for your staff to meet and learn from people in similar roles to them.

Mentoring can be so effective and can really make a difference to someone’s work satisfaction and motivation. It benefits both people (the mentee and the mentor), but there needs to be time for it—so make sure that they’re each given the time to make it work properly.

You could also consider a scheme like the mentoring/peer support scheme offered by the membership network, Charity Comms for key members of your team.

2. Use your existing staff and share knowledge

Sharing knowledge within the organisation sounds so obvious but it’s often overlooked. There are lots of ways of facilitating this; through one-to-one chats, meetings with other teams or informal presentations and workshops.

If you have an employee who is an expert in a particular skill or programme, you could run monthly lunch-and-learn sessions. Not only does it celebrate their knowledge, but it also allows other members of staff to pick up a new skill.

Even if budgets were no issue at all, most organisations don’t do enough to share knowledge in this way.

3. Job rotation

This can be a good way of allowing staff to develop new, on-the-job skills that also help them learn more about how the charity works.

The more traditional way of doing this is through secondments but it doesn’t have to be that formal—it could also be about job-swapping for a day a week. Or it could mean managers making the effort to rotate responsibilities or accounts across their team.

4. Training courses

Review the training courses you use. It can often be cheaper to book a trainer who comes to you rather than use external training courses that can also incur travel or accommodation expenses.

Think about sending fewer people and asking those who do go to feedback to their wider team.

Also, don’t forget your contacts. You may well have ex-colleagues who work freelance now and who could be paid to do a bespoke talk or presentation that could be far more useful than more generic training options—this is another great way of training staff on a budget.

5. Online training and webinars

The number of really excellent online training courses and webinars available free, or for cheaper than attending a course, has shot up since the pandemic, when all training was forced to go virtual. So it’s worth doing some online searches to see what’s available in the areas you need.

There are also platforms like membership that allows employees to learn in their own time, or designated work time. You could consider setting aside one hour a week for online training like this.

We also have lots of online courses available through our site, and you can also encourage staff to do some individual research into training that specifically addresses their needs.

You could even put together your own directory of useful online courses, and learning and development resources and make this available through your staff intranet or internal programmes.

6. Utilise charity sector organisations

Look into the training and mentoring schemes offered by voluntary sector organisations like the Chartered Institute of Fundraising and NCVO. 

NCVO has a number of free courses, including webinars, and has staggered pricing based on the size/income of your charity.

And if you can’t splash out for the individual courses, the NCVO has a treasure trove of information in their online Knowhow Guides.

7. Volunteering

This is also a great way for your employees to learn and fill any skills gaps. If you allow your staff time off for volunteering, and encourage them to take it, you’ll likely gain more back from them than the value of the time invested.

So, don’t panic. Training your staff on a budget is possible.

There are so many ways in which people can acquire and develop skills—from time given over to e-learning, to job rotations, to mentoring, to traditional paid-for courses.

The most important thing is that managers create personalised training plans in collaboration with each member of staff; bespoke plans that prioritise what’s most useful for their current role and for their future development at the charity.

Do this and you can retain and develop your most precious resource: talented, loyal staff—while also up-skilling those who may be struggling.

Got a role to fill? Post a job here.

This post was originally published in 2019 but has been fully updated to ensure relevance and to reflect the current job seeker experience.