How Long Does it Take to Develop Training?

One of the most frequently asked questions about training is, "How long does it take to develop training?" Its close cousin is "How much does it cost to develop training?" Of course the answers to both are some variation of "It depends". In this post I'm going to look at some of the variables that go into answering this question. The key thing to keep in mind is that developing training is much more than throwing some bullets into slides and recording them - that is, if you want it to be engaging, meaningful, and valued. There are some nuances around in-house vs. outsourced development, but I'll look at that in more detail in another post. 

The Data

The Association for Talent Development has conducted periodic research on this question - you can see their 2020 results at https://www.td.org/insights/how-long-does-it-take-to-develop-training-new-question-new-answers. They looked at instructor-led vs. e-learning vs. microlearning and different levels of complexity for each. Unsurprisingly today, learning assets are shorter than the hour Chapman uses; setting aside microlearning, the average length of a module was 17-26 minutes and the average time to develop a module was 48-155 hours. At the midrange of each of those ranges, a 21.5 minute module would take 107 hours. Extrapolating that out to a 10-hour comprehensive certificate program to run over 2-3 days, you could reasonably expect it to take nearly 3,000 hours, or 18 months for a single full-time resource. Because of the different skillsets involved, your development schedule wouldn't need to start on September 1, 2021 and go to March 1, 2023 - subject matter experts could be drafting one module, while instructional designers and voiceover talent work on others, and the LMS expert on still others. 

Articulate is a well-known provider of tools for creating training content. Someone asked this question in their forums around 2013 and the general consensus was a minimum of 1 hour per minute of finished training content; courses with significant interactivity were 3-6+ hours per minute of finished content. So again, if you're looking at a 10-hour or 600 minute course, 600 hours is a fair minimum for instructor-led and basic e-learning and it will likely be more like double that - or more - if it's any more sophisticated than PowerPoint and audio. 

The Chapman Alliance has done extensive research on this topic, which you can find at http://www.chapmanalliance.com/howlong/. While the figures are quite dated now, they did provide additional insight by breaking the development time into more granular tasks. For instructor-led classroom training, they suggest the following as percentages of development time spent on the various tasks required. 

• Front-end analysis: 12%
• Instructional design: 16%
• Lesson plan development: 12%
• Creation of handouts: 8%
• Student guide/workbook development: 11%
• PowerPoint or other visual development: 16%
• Test and exam creation: 8%
• Project management during development: 7%
• SME/stakeholder reviews: 8%
• Other: 2%

For e-Learning, the tasks are similar, but there are some differences: 

• Front-end analysis: 9%
• Instructional design: 13%
• Storyboarding: 11%
• Graphic production: 12%
• Video production: 6%
• Audio production: 6%
• Authoring/programming: 18%
• QA testing: 6%
• Project management: 6%
• SME/stakeholder reviews: 6%
• Pilot/Test: 4%
• Other: 1%

In a blended model, some costs could be saved/shared through reuse, most likely in the areas of front-end analysis and instructional design. 

This does not mean that you have to develop a 10-hour course all at once, of course. It's very useful to get content out the door as it's available so you can "kick the tires", make sure it meets the audience's needs, assess the quality of everything from the marketing to the content to the learning management system experience, and so forth. But someone needs to keep an eye on the bigger, course-focused picture to ensure that the various pieces can come together in a logical flow that meets the overall course learning objectives. 

Note that neither set of tasks includes loading anything into an LMS, nor developing any sort of awareness campaigns or other marketing activities, both of which are complex and intensive streams of work. I'll look at how to market training effectively in another post. 

But Webinars! 

By now many non-training-developers will be scoffing at these figures, arguing that, "Well, it doesn't take that long to do a webinar - let's just repurpose those!" Depending on the nature of the content, maybe - webinars can be educational, of course. But they are often not designed as learning activities, with learning outcomes and a content flow that supports them. Furthermore, many sponsored webinars are little more than thinly-disguised sales pitches, and any learning that takes place is completely accidental. This is obviously not true for all vendors, or all sponsored webinars. But it is true for a significant number of them, despite associations' and organizations' best efforts to rein them in. And the same applies for e-books, infographics, etc. - some are good and educational, some are pure pitches. If you take one of those truly insightful webinars or e-books, you'll find the same level of development effort as outlined above. 

The Bottom Line

...is that good, effective training is not an afternoon or a week's work. The project management iron triangle applies here as it does elsewhere: "Fast, cheap, good - you get to pick two." Well-executed training can change the way organizations work, but it takes time, expertise, and experience to build something that is truly transformational.