Moving training online: how much can you save?

June 13, 2023

Here is a simple piece of advice for driving improvements in your business: if you aren't measuring it, you can't change it.

What does that mean when it comes to trucking? The most straightforward answer is reducing your costs. And if you want to reduce your costs, you need to be able to measure all of the factors that affect them.

Driver training, and the safety of the fleet, can play a big role in driving costs down. Better training means a safer fleet, a safer fleet means lower costs across many metrics, and so on. But what we want to know is how online training can improve a carrier's numbers, and to do that we'll need to do a deep dive into the numbers and figure out the return on investment. Our recent CarriersEdge webinar provides complete details on the quick payback for online training.

There are three sources of value that need to be considered when moving to online training:

• Reducing the cost of the training status quo: this is the straight apples-to-apples comparison of online training costs to the traditional in-person kind
• Quantifying improvements in operations: what kind of change is this training causing, and how do you measure it?
• New capabilities to grow your business: these are the unexpected benefits and opportunities that occur with using online training as a replacement or a supplement to regular training

Before we get into the details, it's important to remember that training can't fix people's behavior. If people know what they're supposed to do, but don't want to do it, training isn't going to fix it. What training can do is fix knowledge-related problems. It can remind people (and reinforce) what they already know. It can also broaden their knowledge base and help them see the bigger picture of how safety fits in with their company's culture.

The Status Quo and Determining ROI

Traditional training — the "status quo" — means classroom meetings. It starts with orientation and onboarding and progresses to quarterly safety meetings. Often there is one-on-one coaching/training if a driver is having issues - securing loads or hard braking for example. But what are the costs involved? Let's take a look.

In our Inside The Numbers webinar (and in a previous post), we broke down the numbers and compared what it would cost to convert just two quarterly meetings from in-person to online. We imagined a 50-driver fleet with a driver trainer, 'John' who gets paid $60,000/per year (we know it's an absurdly low number, but we're trying to be conservative). After factoring in the other costs for John's position (e.g. benefits, overhead), and dividing by the number of days John works in a year, we arrive at the numbers below...

But quarterly training meetings aren't the only training you are likely to have. Many fleets are broad-based and have some compliance training needed - hazmat renewal every few years, for example, or perhaps some drivers also operate forklifts and need training. The point is that the cost of an annual training subscription is offset by just two quarterly meetings alone, while also allowing you to access the additional training the fleet might need for the entire year.

Remember that online training doesn't need to be a replacement for all in-person training. Those face-to-face interactions are critical for building relationships within the team, but if you can use online as a supplement that replaces some of the in-person training, it can add considerable value.

Quantifiable Improvements

If we look beyond the straight cost comparison, shifting your training approach can add quantifiable improvements to your safety program. Remember, we're in this to reduce our costs, so we need to understand the other kinds of numbers that go into targeting that.

Online training can help you improve your safety scores as it becomes part of your balanced 'safety diet'. We break it into three parts: Repair and maintenance, violations, and damages and other payouts. A fleet can easily add these costs up, then divide them by the number of miles driven to understand their safety cost-per-mile. Our experience shows the number can range from 1.3 to 2.4 cents per mile.

Imagine a 60-truck fleet where each truck runs, on average, 100,000 miles. And let's say the company's safety cost is 1.6 cents per mile:

What sort of safety cost reduction can we reasonably expect with a training program? While there are some fleets that have seen a 50-75% reduction in these costs, they are usually the ones with terrible safety records to begin with. More often we've seen fleets improve by 10-20%. Doing the math, a 10% improvement in that $108,000 reduces your cost by $10,800. This imaginary company of 60 drivers would have just spent $3,600 on an annual subscription to save $10,800 in safety costs. And that's on top of the direct savings you made in reducing the direct cost of in-person training.

New Capabilities

There are a lot of things you can do with online training that you just can't do in person, and taking advantage of those will get you all sorts of benefits. For one, there are no more no-shows. Online training can be delivered to your drivers via a tablet or laptop when it's convenient for them to tackle the content. Since online training takes place on the road or at home, you don't have to corral them to come in for in-house training, nor do you have to set up make-up sessions.

Second, online training allows you to validate that your drivers actually learned the content. You can track and monitor results - and provide follow-up help to drivers if you see them struggling in any particular area. And it can show trends in how your drivers are absorbing the material.

What's more, it gives you an extra layer of protection: since you have a safety paper trail, you're arming yourself should you ever be pulled into litigation. And that same paper trail can be used for insurance and other audits.

And finally, you have a chance to do more training than you used to have time for. With no limit on how many courses drivers take, fleets can boost documented learning in so many areas. You can move beyond regulatory basics and get to subjects you never had time for before.

So remember: one of the ways you can reduce your costs is by targeting your training and safety expenses. And you can see those reductions across three different areas: the first is reducing the straight cost of your training program, whether by replacing your in-person program or supplementing it with online training. The second has to do with the improvements you see when the training gets rolling: a better-trained fleet will cost you less in violations, repair and maintenance, and more.

But there is also a new set of capabilities that appear: the ability to monitor and troubleshoot your drivers' learning, the protection of having trackable and verifiable training data in case of an audit, and the possibility of pushing your team's learning into areas and subjects you didn't have time for before. All of which cycle back into a better-performing fleet and lower costs.