When you dedicate the time to creating this type of content yourself, you can rest assured that your technicians will be trained the way you need them to be trained to turn wrenches, repair, and sell the products specific to your organization.
Selecting the right learning management system to support the diverse needs of your extended enterprise is quite the undertaking. Once you’ve made your selection and you’re ready to start diving into your training content, you might think that the biggest portion of your investment is behind you – but that’s not quite the case.
Your content is the driving force behind your training program and it will comprise about 70 to 80% of your overall training expense. The cost of your LMS is only a fractional piece of this investment. The investment that you’re pouring into your training content isn’t as straightforward as writing a check to your LMS developer, but it will trickle down into the expense of your instructors who are out there teaching your technicians how to turn wrenches, your learning and development team who are developing SCORM and e-learning courses, and everywhere in between.
To maximize your return on this investment, you must have a plan for it and you must look at your content in a couple of strategic ways.
Where Should You Invest Your Content Development Dollars?
Finding the best way to maximize your content development investment involves a thorough evaluation of your training program and the elements that it needs. There will be courses and topics that are going to be very customized to your specific business or organization, and there’s no way around it other than to create that content yourself. However, there are plenty of training courses that may not be quite as specific that you can procure from an alternative location.
When it comes to soft skills training, compliance, and workplace safety training, you don’t have to start from scratch. These types of training are not particularly unique to your business or organization, and there are libraries of ready-made content available to meet these needs. These resources can help you avoid unnecessary content creation and focus on maximizing your content development investment.
Some of these libraries even have customizable features, allowing you to take ready-made content and tweak it slightly to accommodate your brand and the specifics surrounding your industry. The saves you the time of creating your own courses from scratch, but start from a model that allows you the flexibility to create specific elements as they pertain to your organization.
What Do You Need To Create Yourself?
You will want to invest the majority of your content dollars in concepts unique to your business, such as your products, services, and sales needs, to ensure that the training meets the needs of your extended enterprise.
Creating your own content can also help ensure that your technicians are receiving the specific training they need as it pertains to their role. Role-specific training is not only helpful in identifying specific job duties and gauging competency of those duties but also helps your technicians understand what training they must complete to advance in their careers or to achieve the next level of accreditation or certification.
To drive points home and to appeal to the conceptual learners that might be in your audience, creating your own training can be helpful in presenting case studies or examples in your training program. These types of examples are highly specific and circumstantial, and they will need to be authored from scratch to present the information in a way that can help your learners grasp the overall concept of the training.
How to Make Sure Your Content Is Effective and Optimized
Optimizing your e-learning content can help set your learners up for success and ensure that your training program is conveying your training messaging. Ensure that you are clearly identifying training objectives for your courses. Why is the information important to the learner? What should they understand better at the conclusion of the course? When your learners understand the whys and the outcomes behind their training content, they are more apt to absorb and apply the information that they learn.
There’s no avoiding the fact that there will need to be hands-on training in your organization to help reinforce concepts and gauge the competency of your technicians. However, there are many ways that you can take a blended approach to give your technicians critical information prior to hands-on training events to ensure that they are prepared for the content they will be presented in a hands-on environment.
Incorporating a blended approach to your training program can help you ensure that the training in your hands-on sessions is more effective and optimized. Your hands-on training will be the most expensive version of training in your entire program, so you want to make sure it is specific and optimized to be effective.
How to Improve Efficiency In Your Training Program
Once you have completed the elements of your training program, you will want to understand how to best improve the efficiency of your learners as they go through your training content. How do you know that your learners are ready to progress to the next step of training? How do you know they are retaining the information you’ve conveyed to them? One way to do this is to implement pre- and post-testing procedures.
These checkpoints can help you identify your technicians’ base knowledge and verify whether they are ready to participate in hands-on training or need more supplemental materials before doing so. These assessments are also helpful in confirming that the desired concept was absorbed and retained in any training they received and can assist you in documenting and measuring the competency of your technicians.
Lean on LatitudeLearning’s Partnerships
Designed specifically with extended enterprise training in mind, LatitudeLearning allows organizations to deliver training to external audiences such as customers, partners, dealers, and suppliers. Our LMS can be customized with your organization’s branding, logos, and colors to provide a seamless and branded experience for your learners. We understand the importance of having seamless content, and that’s why we developed a partnership with a readymade library that holds those same values at heart.
LatitudeLearning has an established partnership with BizLibrary to streamline content creation for your extended enterprise. BizLibrary offers a vast library of pre-built, customizable training content covering various topics, including compliance, leadership, soft skills, sales, customer service, and more. This extensive content library saves time and effort in creating training materials from scratch and can help set the foundation for your training program.
The content provided by BizLibrary is developed by industry experts and instructional designers, ensuring high quality and relevance to the training needs of the extended enterprise. While BizLibrary offers ready-made content, it also provides tools and resources for customization, allowing organizations to tailor the content to their specific industry, company culture, and learning objectives. These libraries are also regularly updated to ensure current, up-to-date content is available with the latest industry trends, regulations, and best practices.
Using a library that can put readymade content at your fingertips can take some of the stress and expense out of your training program. If you’re ready to lean into content creation with the help of a readymade library, visit our website to learn more about LatitudeLearning and our partnership with BizLibrary.
