For those curious few that made it past the headline, there is an important but generally overlooked side to the education space, efficiency. Efficiency not in the massive online course sense or an ideal for bringing all training to everyone, but in the day-to-day that many institutions and their staff work within.

Over the past five years of experiencing very different educational models, from accredited higher education and trade schools to unaccredited bootcamps and specialized centers, this has shown to be a consistent theme. Smart and passionate teams manually working their way through disconnected and outdated systems to complete routinized tasks, many of which could easily be automated. There are, of course, myriad ways this could be accomplished and each one could be served within future posts, but the missed opportunity highlighted here surrounds employee morale, increased revenue, and how those together can enable improved educational outcomes and specialized training increasingly in demand by today's employers.

Morale

Any system, back-end or otherwise, exists for the sake of its users. Of course, a system is there to enable business outcomes, metrics, scale, and all the things. At the core though it's really there to enable its users to do all those things efficiently and with minimal error. When we fail to consider and invest in these systems it is a signal to its users that the investment is not worth their time.

The time they may spend manually gathering information, double-checking rosters, duplicating data entry, and so on was not worth the time, thought, or investment to solve. With just a small amount of any of those, and by helping the users, we can free up not only measurable time and reduce human errors but also lower the mental bandwidth needed to do the same number of tasks.

The effects on the employees and users from knowing their time is valued, having less manual and duplicate work to accomplish, and fewer errors to chase down together are profound. Not only can users of the system feel cared for and increase discretionary effort but the increased mental bandwidth can free up time for what most businesses really need, greater creative problem-solving and productivity initiative.

Revenue

The second and more obvious outcome of this increase in efficiency is additional revenue. With many educational institutions struggling in the current climate as of this writing, it is certainly a welcome one. Simply having less staff able to execute a higher volume with increased mental bandwidth and built-in systemic slack is nothing but upside for any business, and the educational sector is no exception.

The most exciting part here is that revenue is additional fuel for a business that can be used in a number of ways. Growth is always a desired one, of course, but an additional impact of an increase in cash is the ability to undertake quality improvement.

Outcomes

Lastly, and one of the most exciting ones for myself, is that all of those benefits previously stated add up to improved student outcomes and the ability to launch small cohort specialized training at an affordable price. Not necessarily education for all, yet, but highly specialized education where it's needed to teach the technical and creative problem-solving skills we are increasingly in short supply of.

Bloom's 2 Sigma problem from 1984 made a strong case for the efficacy of this type of training, and while it isn't the most exciting topic to discuss, operational efficiency is one step to making this possible. Not only can we close the gap between the ratio of learners and coaches, but also increase the quality of those coaches while making it as easy as possible to focus on what they're really there for. At CG Spectrum, it has allowed for running hundreds of very small classes, between 1-4 students, with minimal operational staff all while connecting them with working professionals to enhance their educational experience.