As e-Learning continues to gain popularity, businesses are spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing off-the-shelf training material. While having a choice is never a bad thing, the one-size-fits-all approach of off-the-shelf courses isn’t always the best option.
Sure, opting for pre-built training material is cheaper and less time-consuming. However, the results and effectiveness associated with such training material are average, at best.
If you’re still unsure whether your investment in creating custom training content will pay off, consider these reasons:
Developing Course Content Is Now Cheaper And Faster
Just as the marketplace is populated with off-the-shelf e-Learning courses, there is also an abundance of authoring softwares to choose from. These authoring tools come pre-loaded with all the tools and templates you need to create a consistent training experience for your workforce.
With the right innovation, an authoring tool can help you create extremely immersive and interactive courses that will keep your learners engaged and boost the effectiveness of your training content. At the same time, the preloaded templates and interactivities will allow you to create course material in a relatively shorter span of time.
Not to forget, the templates work beautifully to create a consistent experience for distributed work forces, or in cases where you are creating multiple courses for the same audience.
The best part is, the cut-throat competition between the many authoring tools in the market has made them very affordable. This means, with a little bit of investment and a lot of smart work, even smaller businesses that are bootstrapped for the budget can create high-value training courses for their employees.
Custom Training Content Is More Cost-Effective In The Long Run
When your business is in its inception stages and there are only a few employees to train, you may consider opting for a subscription-based training model with an e-Learning business. While these work beautifully, they aren’t very cost-effective in the long run.
As your business grows and more employees are trained, the cost of subscription-based training will increase exponentially.
Short-sighted business owners only look at the (relatively) high upfront costs of creating custom training material. However, you have built a business with the purpose of growing it and when it does, your custom training content costs will not add up. Instead, the “high” investment made into developing a course for say, a workforce of 10, will still be used to train 50 or 100 employees.
Custom Training Content Is Aligned With Your Unique Needs
Every organisation is different. Sure, an organisation may offer the same services/products as several others but the internal processes, policies, and environment are almost always unique.
This is true for two reasons- one, organisations are comprised of individuals and no two individuals are the same and two, each organisation has to deal with unique clients and vendors, so each organisation’s journey to success is unique.
When you develop training content for your organisation, you can ensure that the content is aligned with the most pressing issues and needs of your organisation. Moreover, by adding unique case studies from your own experiences, you can make sure previous mistakes are never repeated. Similarly, if a unique process has worked for your organisation, your course content can be used to teach new joiners to replicate the sad process.
The point is, your organisation is unique, its needs are unique, and a one-size-fits-all approach will (most probably) will not be able to address these needs.
Conclusion
If you still think the cost and effort involved in creating custom e-Learning content is too high, consider combining a custom and off-the-shelf approach.
For instance, a course can comprise of a few unique, internally developed modules that are the most important part of a training and the rest of the modules can be sourced from off-the-shelf course vendors. For more details visit https://stormotion.io/blog/how-to-create-an-e-learning-platform-of-your-own/
