Custom eLearning is a significant part of any corporate training program. Corporate training, as a whole, serves to boost employees’ critical skills, develop new skills, guide their careers, increase engagement, and build a solid corporate culture. We continue to learn every day, in our lives as well as in our jobs. Thus, having a strong corporate training program is paramount.
The criticality of continuing education in the workplace makes the development of a good corporate training program rather tricky. While there are many off-the-shelf offerings for all sorts of pre-built courses, they, very seldom, align with a specific’s company processes and core messages. To be truly effective, corporate learning must include custom courses, specific to your company’s needs.
Let’s look at some of the reasons why investing in custom eLearning solutions is a wise move for the success of your corporate learning program.
1. Nobody Knows Your Employees’ Needs Better Than You
Your company has the knowledge it needs to do what it does. Clearly, your company has some advantages over your competitors. There are Subject Matter Experts with extensive experience and know-how. Why not utilize their expertise? Customizing your eLearning courses will create a product your company alone can use. While some of the concepts might be generic, each company has its own approaches to applying them. The company’s specific procedures, policies, and core messages are not addressed in off-the-shelf products. Making eLearning your own defines your company and keeps the messages consistent. Custom eLearning solutions can also be customized to a much greater degree as compared to off-the-shelf courses. Your company’s brand standards, for example, can be applied in custom eLearning courses, resulting in a consistent experience for your corporate learners.
2. You Build It, You Own It, You Only Pay Once
While some off-the-shelf vendors charge per user, most of them charge monthly, subscription-based fees. This basically means you pay royalties to use the courses. When you add it all up, after months of use and thousands of users, the amounts can total to hefty sums. Unlike off-the-shelf programs, developing custom eLearning courses may require a large upfront investment, but the products will belong to your organization and will be essentially free to use, regardless of the number of users and the length of time the courses are accessed. The main issues many companies share regarding custom eLearning development is the price. To give you some ballpark figures, it can take from 70 to 250 hours and can cost from $5,000 to $30,000 to develop one hour of an eLearning course. The cost, of course, depends on the content, the tool, number of reviews, number of SMEs, etc. While this may seem quite an investment at first, it is arguably more effective in the long run.
3. Updates Are Easy
Custom eLearning solutions are built on demand. The courses are tailored for your specific requirements, communicate internal approaches, and correspond to certain corporate practices. However, corporate learning follows the cycle of continuous improvement. Technology changes, knowledge is gained, and corporate practices and requirements change. This makes updates to eLearning inevitable, but also much less costly, as you own the courses and can focus the updates to reflect the new changes, instead of having to replace the entire program.
4. Increased Learner Engagement And Knowledge Retention
By using custom eLearning solutions, you are creating very useful corporate training. Customization will make the courses fun and engaging, with a clear focus on application. An effective corporate training should provide critical knowledge useful for everyday work and do it in a fun and interesting way. Customizing allows the implementation of a variety of strategies for boosting engagement and retention, such as crafting internal personas, using familiar scenarios for serious games, awarding badges for achievements, etc.
When the employees know that the eLearning they have to take is not a page-turner, but will allow them to learn something truly relevant to their job, their involvement and commitment are measurably higher.
5. Increased Collaboration And Ability To Measure Effectiveness
When corporate learning is focused on supporting learners, and when it uses familiar company branding and strategy, it more closely aligns with the business and employee’s personal goals. This makes collaboration much more likely and more efficient. Custom eLearning programs usually employ communication and collaboration tools as well, in the form of forums, chats, wikis, etc.
As custom eLearning content is created on demand, the learning team can augment it with specific tests or requirements meant to aid in measuring the training efficiency. More thorough measurements (Levels 2, 3, and even 4) can also be designed for custom eLearning programs.
Have you experienced the use of custom eLearning in corporate training programs? Share your thoughts with us.
