5 Reasons to Outsource Learning & Development Content
In the past 8 months, many employees have repeatedly transitioned between working in offices and working from home as COVID-19 responses have evolved. Furthermore, with over 9 million new jobs created since June 2020, employees have never been more affected by changing times and future uncertainty. In order to address the needs of both new and existing employees, businesses have begun adopting microtraining as a key component of their learning and development strategy.
While microtraining is high value, self-paced, and high impact, implementing these tools for your team can be a complicated and time-consuming task. By outsourcing your Learning and Development activities, you can see benefits sooner and enable your organization to focus on assessing employee development needs and building your training strategy. Here are 5 reasons to outsource your Learning and Development (L&D) Content:
1. Improved Outcomes for Learners
Typically, most training professionals do not need a completely new training program, they just need to improve their program outcomes. Outsourcing your L&D content to a microtraining platform can improve your training outcomes by delivering better course retention, increased learner engagement, and enhanced lesson reinforcement.
Grab Attention
Typically, there is only a 15% click rate for HR/training department emails. We want to help you improve this number. Releasing new learning content through a microtraining platform is more effective and ensures it gets your employees’ attention. When initiating communications through our platform, using personalized text messages directly to learners’ phones, clients typically see a 90% engagement rate.
Deeper Engagement = Deeper Learning
With the recent surge of new employees, getting and keeping them engaged, and comprehending each objective is imperative for your company’s success. Outsourcing L&D content allows you to leverage different engagement strategies to increase participation and comprehension. Our platform utilizes multi-format learning including video, audio, slides, polls, and games (see reason 2 for more specifics). Furthermore, the platform can be used on phones, tablets, and laptops and is accessible whether you are remote or in the office. The combination of all of these engagement methods have proven to increase training efficiency by over 30% when you outsource your L&D content.
Ongoing Reinforcement & Self-Evaluation
In a world where 70% of training content is forgotten within 24 hours, being able to reinforce and test yourself is of the utmost priority. Our platform allows for personalized quizzes, polls, fill-in-the-blanks, or any of the seven different engagement types, to allow for enhanced reinforcement and self-evaluation. For example, if there is a topic your employees are having difficulty comprehending, you can see this on their dashboard and prescribe additional content to reinforce the concept.
2. Unique and Special Engagements
Outsourcing your L&D content enables you to take advantage of different engagements that would otherwise not be available. For example, when it comes to testing your employees’ comprehension, there are games, such as order challenges, fill-in-the-blanks, and quizzes where learners can earn points. These engagements allow learners to take a break from reading slides and listening to videos and actively click, drag, and interact with the content they are learning. Time and time again, this process has proven to increase participation and comprehension and cut down on training time. When it comes to gauging your employee’s comprehension, there are polls and scales that allow the learner to assess their comprehension level and thus, allow the employer to add or remove content. Our approach has proven to have specialized benefits in keeping your salesforce ready, onboarding new employees, training remote employees, and keeping your customer service team prepared and updated during these constantly changing times.
3. Get the Intended Value of Gamification
Gamification is a type of engagement where learners earn points for correct answers and compete with other learners to correctly complete tasks. Competition and rewards have proven to double engagement and participation compared to a standard training curriculum. Furthermore, you can optimize your learning environment using gamification. The platform enables you to create challenges, track learners’ progress, see your ranking across eligible learners, and recognize participants’ achievements. Companies using gamification have shown an increase in productivity and engagement of 50 and 60 percent respectively. This increase in productivity and engagement can help your organization stay atop of these changing times and quickly transition to any new updates.
Track Learners’ Progress
Outsourcing your L&D content gives you the capability to use robust learning analytics that provides employers with real-time data of each learner. This data highlights the strengths and weaknesses of your learners and can help your team identify areas of improvement.
Recognize Participants’ Achievements
By tracking learners’ progress and awarding points for correct answers and completed tasks, organizations can reward learners with gift cards, awards, and many more benefits. These small rewards have been shown to increase participation, friendly competition, and company morale.
Real-life Examples of Engagement
Duolingo: Recognizing the difficulty and frustration that comes with learning a new language, Duolingo created game-like tasks that featured points, badges, and learning streaks to help users stay more engaged and enhance participation. When using Duolingo, learners now have more motivation to learn a new language which has resulted in better comprehension across all learners.
NikeFuel: Not many people enjoy exercising naturally. To counter this, NikeFuel implemented gamification in its product. When users exercised, they would be awarded points, streaks, badges, and rewards which increased interaction and effectiveness of its product.
4. Implementation by Experts
When you outsource your L&D content to experts, these experts bring specialized skills and experience to implement solutions that are tailored to your learners’ needs and goals. While your team may be more knowledgeable in specific learning content, L&D experts are adept at designing and converting your knowledge to learning content best suited to address the needs of your learners and maximize efficiency. Additionally, these experts can bring a fresh perspective to your content and delivery that can add value to your learning content which facilitates better engagement, comprehension, and retention.
5. Improved Outcomes for Employers
While we have covered the numerous benefits of outsourcing L&D content for learners, there are two additional key benefits for employers.
Cut Costs
There are multiple cost efficiencies gained by outsourcing your L&D content.
- If many employees are needed to create and design the content, there is significant overhead that could better be used on learning strategy and program planning.
- When employees are focused on content creation, they have less time to analyze the business needs and design courses to address any identified challenges.
- Speed to market is dramatically improved: Outsourcing your L&D content to experts takes an average of 10-15% less time to develop training materials versus doing it internally.
- Outsourcing your L&D content enables you to manage your costs and deliverables upfront rather than leaving them unknown until the end of the program.
Save Time
Organizations that elect to create their own L&D content typically face longer lead times, require specialized solutions training to work within their LMS systems and interfaces, and see budget constraints on software customization and maintenance. By outsourcing your L&D content, you can realize positive effects in all three areas while enabling your training managers to be strategic partners to constituents across the organization. Especially under the pressures of our current work environment, increasing turnaround time is crucial for onboarding, preparing, and updating your employees and teams.
Concannon Business Consulting (CBC) is a full-service consultancy focused on optimizing your learning and training results. Our team of experts are highly experienced in building microtraining programs to achieve organizational goals. Our team will manage a mobile training and microlearning solution that fits your needs from start to finish. Beyond a microlearning platform, we’ll work with your management team to completely customize and develop your training solution. Contact us today to set up a consultation or personalized demo experience.
