In a SmartTan.com poll, 40 percent of indoor tanning businesses said each employee is trained for at least 30 hours.

Ten percent of salons said their employees go through 20 to 30 hours of training, 29 percent answered 10 to 20 hours, and 21 percent said 1 to 10 hours of training.

It’s becoming clearer than ever that an investment in employee education keeps businesses running healthily.

There are plenty of opinions on how to make an indoor tanning salon successful, but the place where all of these strategies intersect is professionalism. If you can raise the bar on the training you provide to your employees, it’s an investment that pays off with improved sales, informed clients, independent workers and the ability to change the way your community perceives indoor tanning.

Any way you slice it, training costs time and money. But in the long run, companies that apply their resources to employees will be more successful than those that view their workers merely as a cost. This is especially true when employees are responsible for embodying the owner’s policies, philosophies, and standards.

The trick is to implement training with the most value.

That’s why e-learning has become so popular, not only at high schools and higher learning institutions, but also with companies of all sizes. Big names like IBM and Ernst & Young have lowered training costs by upwards of 25 percent simply by incorporating a strategic e-learning program into their training.

Smart Tan’s online trainings and certifications bring that technology to your business without having to reinvent the wheel. Smart Tan has offered training and educational materials since 1985, and our UV Tanning certification – previously Basic Technical training – dates all the way back to 1991. With the first and most trusted certification programs, Smart Tan has been improving and refining the system to help owners, operators, trainers, and managers in businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Smart Tan training evolves with the industry and conforms to the highest of standards, and the newest version of the UV Tanning Certification is designed to work better than ever, with its new behavior-based structure.

The benefit of behavior-based training is that is is designed to affect outcomes in your salon. This program teaches your employees how to use their knowledge with your customers, resulting in better customer service and higher consumer confidence. And as salon owners know, service and confidence have a direct impact on revenue in indoor tanning businesses.

With the help of member salons like you, over 20 years of scientific research, industry champion and Smart Tan Vice President Joe Levy, and plenty of helpful visual aids, Smart Tan has put together trainings that ease the strain on your resources while meeting all of your educational needs. For less time and money that it costs you to do in-house trainings, you can provide your employees with the convenience of certifications they can complete on any computer, and provide yourself the peace of mind knowing that tanning’s top authority is shaping the front lines of your business.

To keep expenses low, some salon owners try to do all of their training themselves. It may seem cheaper on the surface, but the hidden costs can run much higher. When an employee is trained by someone from your salon, the wages alone can make the method impractical. At least two people are taken away from performing their duties, which means even more people must be paid to take care of things while training is in session. It can become particularly stressful on owners and managers who train the new hires since their workload effectively doubles, with important administrative tasks taking a backseat, Not to mention it takes even more time to create a thorough, repeatable training program on your own.