Gaining a Competitive Edge Through eLearning

As eLearning becomes more popular as an alternative to traditional instructor-led training, organizations have a plethora of off-the-shelf courses to choose from. Such courses offer a cost-effective and easy way for organizations to venture into the realm of eLearning.

That said, things that are cheap and easy to find seldom drive extraordinary results.

However, that’s not the only reason you should consider developing custom content for your organization’s learning & development needs. Custom learning content has the potential to put your organization ahead of the curve. Here are 5 advantages that come with using custom eLearning content:

1. Better Retention of Training Material

Building custom training content means gathering information, techniques, and case studies from within your organization.

When you undertake this research, not only does it help you identify problem areas that may have previously been overlooked, it also helps you capture and store the knowledge possessed by your existing employees.

Moreover, when you develop custom learning content, you can address the roadblocks faced by individual learners in your organization. While developing personalized content for a large workforce may not be possible, it can be done for special training initiatives such as leadership development.

In fact, top leadership-development training solutions put a special emphasis on personalization of content to build better leaders of tomorrow.

2. Improved Business Performance

aliCustom course development enables organizations to align their learning initiatives and develop learning content that addresses the most pressing needs of your business. You can pinpoint your exact business challenges while still incorporating training-industry best practices.

With time, this will help you develop professionals who are trained specifically for roles and functions that improve the overall business performance of your organization.

3. Improved Learner Motivation

The modern learner does not learn well through long-winded, information-heavy courses. Instead, they are more comfortable with bite-sized learning modules (microlearning) that allow them the freedom to learn anywhere, anytime. In fact, when used in a web-based learning environment, microlearning is 22% better than long-form learning, according to a 2015 study conducted by Germany’s Dresden University of Technology.

When you develop your training content in-house, you can address these learning habits to maximize the efficiency of your course content. Additionally, course content developed while keeping learner needs in mind will result in the learners having greater motivation to complete the course.

Add to that the consumption of course material that is designed to help them be better at their jobs, and you get motivated learners who can’t wait to finish the course and apply the newfound knowledge to their daily tasks.

4. Complete Control Over Content and Deployment

Unlike off-the-shelf courses, developing custom learning content allows businesses to take complete control of the development process. As mentioned earlier, this will allow you to address challenges that are specific to your business.

Moreover, custom content can be branded to offer learners and instructors a seamless experience while they teach or consume the course content.

This control over the course content also carries over to deployment. This can be explained with an example: Let’s assume your business is using a complex POS (point-of-sale) software that your employees need to learn to use. However, a particular department only makes use of certain functionalities of the software. In this case, employees from this department will only be exposed to training content relevant to them.

Approaching the learning in this way will allow you to minimize the time needed to train employees while maximizing learner efficiency.

5. Better Return on Investment

The advantages listed above boil down to one distinct benefit of custom eLearning content: efficiency in the training process.

With more efficiency, better business performance, a motivated workforce, and a training infrastructure that addresses the needs of your organization, it is easy to imagine how custom training content will improve your organization’s ROI.

Conclusion

Developing custom training content may seem like an expensive undertaking when you look at the up-front costs (and time) involved. However, most off-the-shelf course vendors are charging businesses for each person who uses their training material. If you have a growing organization, this pay-per-user model of pricing may turn out to be more expensive than developing custom course material that stays with your organization for as long as it is relevant.

Content written by guest author: Costa

CMOE guest authors are carefully selected industry experts, researchers, writers and editors with extensive experience and a deep passion for leadership development, human capital performance, and other specialty areas. Each guest author is uniquely selected for the topic or skills areas they are focused on. All posts are peer-reviewed by CMOE.