Online learning can positively impact employee engagement, productivity and revenue. Research shows that companies that offer online learning as their primary Learning and Development (L&D) resource enjoyed faster productivity/onboarding. There is no shortage of quality online courses currently populating dozens of learning platforms all over the world. For many managers tasked with the learning and development of their workforce’s L&D, it might seem cost effective to license and curate from this dearth of providers. But is it really? Here are five reasons why creating a custom learning platform can provide MORE return on your employee development investment, rather than licensing or curating existing content.
1. Personalized
Anyone can teach someone HOW to do something but only you can teach WHY it is important to your organization and your workforce. It isn’t just your culture that is unique, but also your processes, your systems, your KPIs, and other key metrics. So why try to upskill your workforce with generic messaging? Articulating your unique culture through video provides an opportunity to directly relate to the learner, keep them engaged, and set them up to succeed within your workplace. Your employees will relate and respond more to an instructor that comes from within the organization versus a talking head form a pre existing course.
2. Adaptable
Technology moves quickly, meaning certain content, and especially product-specific content, becomes obsolete quickly. Create a learning product that can evolve as the company, the product, or the technology evolves. By customizing your online learning at the earliest stages of development, you can format the learning in a modular way, making it easy to keep content updated without spending a fortune with each new content update.
3. Scalable
Do you already conduct internal training? Do you expend a lot of resources to onboard new employees? Clients? Is your workforce distributed? It can be expensive flying facilitators across the globe. Are you teaching the same lessons over and over again? What do you do if a crucial stakeholder misses a training? There are only so many workshops that a facilitator can conduct in a week and only so many people they can teach. Creating original video courses helps scale training and allow the subject matter experts to focus on what they do best.
4. Teach Soft Skills
According to LinkedIn’s 2018 U.S Emerging Jobs Report, “The largest skills gap are soft skills.” Skills such as communication, leadership, critical thinking and time management are necessary for professional growth, with many potential employees entering the workforce at a deficit. Do your employees need to be taught how to work collaboratively? How to solve your unique business challenges with critical and creative thinking? How to communicate effectively in meetings? How to conduct interviews without bias? Bespoke video courses address these essential skills as employees navigate the workplace, even in a virtual workplace.
5. Consistent
Shouldn’t the quality of the online learning match the quality of the culture, brand, and values you’ve worked hard to build? If you license two existing courses, they might be wildly different in terms of production and content quality. Creating custom courses means a consistent experience for the learner. Imagine if you want to build a catalog of content, a certification or credential program, a consistent experience is essential for the learner to move seamlessly from course to course.
According to Forbes, “companies that invest in their employees benefited from improved performance, as employees use newly gained skills to do their jobs better, and more effective onboarding which helps employees achieve productivity sooner.” By investing in custom courses up front you are benefiting your existing and future workforce immediately, and long into the future.
Michael Karsh, Co-founder & Executive Producer, Edios Media