The Internet provides training companies and corporate organizations a wealth of options to download off-the-shelf training and elearning courses for their employees and learners. Not only are these elearning courses easily available but are also economically viable. Seems like a good option to meet your organization’s training needs? Well, not exactly – not all things that come cheap offer the best results on investments. Although you may be spoilt for choice, remember it makes more business sense if the training courses are customized to your unique organizational needs and provided in a format that is within the comfort zone of your employees. The better option then is to invest in custom eLearning course development for your enterprise. Though investing in custom eLearning course development will cost you initially, they will bear fruit in the long-run.
Given the competitive business environment, it is imperative to stand out in the crowd to make yourself seen and heard and you can achieve this when your employees are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to make a mark in the market. And the best way to ensure this is by investing in custom eLearning courses for your enterprise.
Why should you invest in custom eLearning course development?
1. You Know Your Business Needs
As said above, search the Internet and you will be spoiled for choice for off-the-shelf courses related to your business. Several authors may have created training courses that seem in line with your domain of work. But it is important to remember these eLearning courses will be generic in nature and may not cover the topics you want to cover for your employee training. Besides, they may not be in sync with your organization’s goals and objectives, a fact which further builds the case for customized eLearning courses.
Custom courses are always more relevant to your work and employees’ needs and will hold you in good stead in the long run. On the other hand, readily available courses may advance your employee skills to some extent, but so will they for your competitors as well. In that case, there is not much chance for you to provide an upper hand to your employees and, consequently, you stand to lose in terms of gaining a competitive edge. Hence, custom eLearning courses are a reliable solution to stand out from the crowd and be relevant to the prevailing market conditions.
2. Eliminates the Concept of One-Size-Fits-All
Taking forward the above point, an external author will not be as aware of your organizational training needs as you are. Your first-hand knowledge about organizational needs, skill gaps, target audience, and market requirements can be channelized to build custom eLearning courses that directly relate to your business goals, thereby eliminating any irrelevant information that could distract your learners and shift focus from your learning goals. For example, you may want onboarding training for your HR department. As new employees join your organization, you need to provide them with the necessary onboarding training to align them with your organizational goals and culture and acquaint them with the necessary processes and functions to adapt them to their new job and responsibilities as smoothly and as quickly as possible. For your organization this means that you need to implement the best onboarding training to achieve objectives and get a competitive edge by retaining the best talent. This is something you can achieve only through custom eLearning courses. Besides, if anytime the training requirements increase, you can easily update your training material accordingly.
3. Circumventing the Generic Tag
There will always be some requirements of your organization that will not be part of any generic training course, no matter how relevant that course is to your employees. This is because no external authors can gauge your exact business needs. Hence, custom eLearning is the only answer in such situations. Even if you take the example of compliance training, you may well feel that it applies equally to all organizations; however, some amount of customization to your business would still be required even though you belong to the same industry.
Also read: Supercharge Your Employee Training Program with Bite Sized Learning
4. Better Knowledge Retention and Outcomes
It goes without saying that custom eLearning courses lead to better learning outcomes. For one, to create these courses, you would first have to conduct an in-depth analysis of your own business processes and day-to-day operations. By adding this process-related information to your eLearning courses, you will be able to improve knowledge retention by capturing useful knowledge and techniques used by your current employees for later use for your future hires. Thus, custom eLearning courses become a stepping stone to build your own organizational story and evolve to the next rung of the ladder in tune with the changing business environment, and that too at little additional cost.
5. Generic and Custom – The Best of Both Worlds
For some organizations, taking the middle path can work best. For example, if you have just started off and have a limited budget, you may start with a combination of both, that is, use pre-built generic courses to set the context, and invest in custom courses to plug the knowledge gaps and customize your training to meet your specific organizational goals; and equip your employees with the necessary knowledge and skill set to survive competition and build your unique brand.
Once you are convinced about the benefits of custom eLearning courses, your next step should be to find an eLearning solution company to create your training material. Once again, the Internet should be your first port of call. However, an online search would provide you a plethora of choices and your next challenge would be to select a genuine company who can conduct custom elearning course development within your budget and time-frame, without compromising on the quality of the output.
If this seems a daunting task, you may wish to consider HurixDigital as your eLearning solution provider. With our award-winning, cloud-based digital publishing platform Kitaboo, you can create your own custom eLearning courses. Kitaboo allows you to custom create your training with access to skilled IT expertise. Our user-friendly digital publishing platform combines innovation with automation, allowing you to create and update your content, add interactive features and tools, share and collaborate, monitor and analyze, all with a few clicks of a mouse.
Related: Things You Must Consider Before Selecting an eLearning Company
Also read: 10 Point Guide to Selecting the Best Digital Publishing Platform