There are ILT costs hiding in your program that are spoiling your budget. Let’s take a look and see how you can squeeze a little more juice out of the (very expensive) ILT lemon.
Hidden Cost #1: Training Operations Tax
According to Training Magazine, United States training teams spent $102.8 billion on training last year, with $64.7 billion going directly to training staff payroll. That’s about 63 cents of every training dollar paying a salary. So, what are they doing all week?
Administrate’s own 2026 Benchmark Analysis found that 124 hours per week were being spent on managing administrative tasks, at an annual average cost of $248,000. For example, Roche Diagnostics would spend 360 hours per quarter just figuring out who teaches what, and where. It required stakeholders from across the organization, and left their team in a reactive posture. Sound familiar?
Your Homework: Training Operations Tax
- How many hours were spent this quarter on administrative tasks?
- Where is the data stored that you need to plan, schedule, and deliver live training? Spreadsheets? Various systems? Someone’s brain?
- How many stakeholders do you need to wrangle to get ILT schedules approved? What are their titles? How much does that approval meeting cost the company?
- How many tools, apps, systems, or other tech do you use to manage training operations? Does all of it work or do you need special workarounds?
- Can you even answer all of these questions? Most teams can’t, and we’re talking very large enterprise training teams.
Hidden Cost #2: Empty Seats
We don’t have a lot of good data on the impact of empty seats across the industry. The last verified report is from 2005, when KnowledgeAdvisors published a 15% average class cancellation rate and 14.7% no-show rate. Since 2005, a lot has changed. The iPhone was invented, for example.
Using webinar data is dicey at best, because live face-to-face training will have a much higher fill rate. But if you’re curious, ON24’s 2025 benchmark shows that 43% of registrants don’t bother to show up. In Administrate’s own benchmark report we found that enterprise organizations are losing about 10% of their annual training budget to empty seats.
(We have a case study on this. Check out how Royal Caribbean put more learners in seats).
Your Homework: Cost of an Empty Seat
- What is your fill rate for ILT programs? Are there patterns that standout (certain courses have lower fill rates, some instructors have higher fill rates, etc).
- How much are you spending per learner for travel, accommodations, food, etc?
- What are your facility fees? Equipment fees? Don’t forget maintenance and service for high value equipment.
- What’s the dollar amount your team would earn back if you had zero empty seats?
Hidden Cost #3: Resource Utilization
You think the cost of an empty seat is high? Imagine the cost of a multimillion dollar air and sea rescue training facility that goes unused. Going to cram this really fun story into this blog to see if you’re still awake: Administrate works with Maersk Training to help them manage their complex, global training. One of the live training programs they conduct is sea rescue, and it involves crashing a burning airplane into the ocean while rescue operators train in the live scenario to save crew and cargo.
For companies like Maersk that rely on expensive, critical, high-value equipment to train (think: airplane simulators, MRI machines, advanced diagnostic equipment, lifesaving technology, or specialized environments like SCUBA facilities) the cost of maintaining these facilities is enormous. Training has to show a very specific ROI to justify keeping these facilities operational.
These costs are sometimes categorized as operations, facilities, or equipment expenses and don’t directly impact the training budget. But, training will still have to defend low utilization scores, or poor optimization strategies for these expensive resources.
Even for smaller teams with much less dramatic training sessions, the cost of training classrooms, IT equipment, and special equipment can be a burden.
Your Homework: The cost of training resources
- What are the annual costs of maintaining training facilities and equipment?
- Where does that budget live in your organization? If it is not with training, how does training have to defend its action against that budget?
- What is the breakeven utilization score for your equipment? That is: how often does the equipment need to be in live training sessions to justify its costs? This question is a tricky one because to answer it, you need to map training to a dollar based success metric which isn’t easy.
- Can you even model these answers?
The biggest levers you can pull: utilization rates & operational costs.
Operational costs.
Operational costs are the obvious target for ILT programs looking to cut costs without cutting training. The problem is when a dozen or more tools get strapped onto an LMS to try and solve training operations. It becomes a security and technical nightmare, often requiring unscalable workarounds. These boils become more obvious in this era of AI and automation, because none of the truly labor-saving technology can do much with complex instructor-led training.
To get a handle on operational costs, enterprise teams are turning to Training Management Systems. These are dedicated operational platforms that manage the complex parts of instructor-led training that can’t afford to go wrong. They do a great job of eliminating manual work and slashing operational costs for ILT to a fraction of baseline.
If you haven’t figured it out: Administrate is a Training Management System, one built only for enterprise class training.
Utilization rates.
Utilization is a ratio of metrics that rarely live together in the same report: instructor availability, room and resource booking, enrollment, and attendance.
Typically, each metric sits in a discrete system. Calculating utilization requires a human to assemble it by hand. Which means it gets computed when needed, usually for a presentation. It should be a running benchmark or goal for your team.
The same fragmentation is why you can't forecast, incidentally. Projecting capacity you have never measured is not forecasting.
Managing ILT Costs: Case Studies in Lowering ILT Costs
Roche Diagnostics
Roche implemented a Training Management System (Administrate) and slashed the time it took to build quarterly ILT schedules from 360 hours to 40, an 89% reduction. Their team can now plan 400 classes in a week where individual teams previously spent 40 to 60 hours each.
Will Osman, their enablement and technology systems lead, put it as moving “from firefighting to forecasting.”
But the money is in what they did next. With real visibility for the first time, Roche set a standardized minimum fill-rate target of 80% and started making data-based decisions about which courses to run and which to cancel. Time savings is great, but drawing a revenue target against fill-rate took them from cost center to command center within the organization.
Royal Caribbean Group
RCG came at the same problem from the demand side. They were losing 10% of their annual training budget to empty seats, automated 87% of vital admin tasks and more than 2,700 copy-paste communications, and got those seats filled. The admin tasks they automated, and the bulk of those communications, were better, personalized and more timely reminders to learners. Both text and email. A reminder to confirm your registration is unglamorous but moves attendance, and attendance is what boosts utilization rates.
What’s eating your team’s time.
We’ve looked at the areas where our customers are saving the most time through automations and operational AI, and there are clear patterns. Listed in order of how much time it eats, here are the things that are costing your ILT the most money:
- Scheduling, and the cascade that follows when one session moves.
- Instructor allocation against availability, qualification, and travel.
- Room, lab, and equipment booking.
- Learner communications: confirmations, reminders, joining details, pre-work, and every change to all of the above.
- Registration and enrollment processing.
- Certificate and credential issuance.
- Invoicing and revenue recognition, if you sell training.
- Reporting and compliance evidence assembly.
A 90 day game plan to lower ILT costs.
Days 1 to 15: Scope your manual work.
Record every coordination task your team takes on. Understand how many different tools they are using and if those tools are working together or not. Do you need to loop in stakeholders to complete admin tasks? Log it. Do you need IT resources to make tools work? Log it.
Days 16 to 30: Pick the three heaviest tasks, automate communications tasks first.
Start with communication processes because they are easier to automate, typically, and they boost attendance which boosts all other cost metrics.
Days 31 to 90: Connect disparate systems.
You may need outside help here, and you may be blocked by API or integration limitations in your tools. But the goal is to connect systems together so they are sharing well-structured data. If you can’t connect tools, log it. That’s fodder for a business case to get rid of those tools.
Every hour of coordination labor is a fixed cost sitting on top of a variable delivery volume. Which is why your cost per learner goes up as your program grows, a fact that makes no intuitive sense and has been quietly embarrassing training leaders in budget meetings for twenty years. Automate the coordination layer and that ratio finally starts working in your favor instead of against you.
The boring 80% isn’t just boring. It’s the part that’s been setting your price.
