Did you know you can create your own online courses for your organisation? It’s a great way to keep staff more engaged in their learning development, and it’s easier than you might think. Here are 10 benefits of creating your own tailored training courses.
Tailored to your business
If you create your own online training course, you can tailor it specifically for your business. People often connect more with training that uses real-world examples, because it shows how the training can benefit them in the job they do. So, by personalising your training courses, you no longer have to hear people asking how the training is relevant for them. The answer will be right there in front of them!
Also, the training courses you create can be specific to the work you do. You might choose to create training courses to teach people your new procedures or processes. Maybe even train them on the custom software you use. The benefits are endless, and you know that an organisation-specific training package is always going to deliver value – provided you create a great course!
Cost-effective
When we talk about cost-effectiveness, we’re talking about value for money. So, to determine the value you get from any training package, you need to look beyond the simple cost of the training. Creating your own course may be cheaper, however, you do need to consider that you (or your designed training expert) will spend time building it. Still, there’s an even bigger picture than that.
Let’s say you send staff off to a generic training course. It’s nice and cheap, relatively speaking, but you then have to factor in the time spent away from work. You also need to consider whether every participant learns something valuable. Ultimately, training should make your staff more skilled and productive. But if they sit in the training room not learning anything new, have you generated any value for money at all?
By creating your own courses, you can ensure that the training is relevant and actually helps people to perform better, and that’s where your real value for money comes from.
Collaboration with staff
The other great thing about creating your own courses is the opportunity to collaborate with staff. Employees enjoy training and development for the most part, but only if they can see some benefits. When you build your own courses, why not seek input from a few key team members? You’ve probably got subject matter experts who can help you put together a range of different training packages.
You can also seek feedback quickly and easily, so you can adjust the training courses if they didn’t quite hit the mark. Best of all, you’re giving staff a voice. Whether in the design of training courses or the post-course assessment, people know they’re being listened to, and when you get teams involved with learning and development, overall employee engagement increases.
More engagement in course content
It’s no secret that training participants can sometimes zone out if they don’t identify with the course content. You often see this in mandatory training courses where the course content doesn’t directly apply to everybody. Many training programs use examples that either isn’t relatable or even worse, would never occur for the participants in a million years. This diminishes the message of the training and makes it harder for people to buy-in.
By creating custom training courses, you can use real examples that staff experience regularly. It creates a connection to the course content, and therefore the learning objectives are more easily met.
Cater to multiple learning styles
Online training isn’t for everybody; however, it is generally considered the type of training that suits most people. The ease of access, the self-paced nature of the training, and the ability to complete it without distractions seem to work for people. There are always going to be those who hunger for more interactivity, but it’s not impossible to deliver that through online training. Include things like quizzes, videos and other interactive features to engage your participants.
This way, you target those who learn by listening, those who learn by doing, and those who learn by reading. You’ll never please 100% of people 100% of the time, but tailored online training courses are certainly a step in the right direction.
It complements external training
The other benefit of creating your own training courses is you can make them complementary to external training. Just because you create some of your own in-house training programs, that doesn’t mean you need to neglect other learning opportunities. By embracing a full mixture of online learning, virtual classrooms, on-site and off-site training, internal and external, you give people more complete learning and development experience.
For example, you could create an internal online training course that covers your policies and procedures around processing payroll. Once people understand the theory, you can give them more of the practical by sending them to specific MYOB training, if that’s the software you use for payroll. There are always ways to tie your internal and external training courses together.
Time-effective
When you create your own online course you can achieve significant time savings for staff. That’s the beauty of eLearning and online training. Staff can do it from their desks or from home if that’s where they work. Courses can be designed as long or short as you like, but the real benefit is that staff don’t have to go anywhere. There’s no wasted time travelling to a training centre or conference room. Your teams can simply log in, complete the training at their pace and then get back to work.
The training itself is even more time-efficient because there are no interruptions. In a classroom setting, there are so many things that make the training take longer. Introductions, icebreakers, group discussion, questions, breaks and much more. While these things are all necessary to make classroom training engaging and effective, they certainly do eat up a lot of time. With online training, you can skip all of that.
Improved knowledge retention
When people are engaged in training courses, their knowledge retention increases. This is partly because they identify more easily with the course content, especially if there are examples and scenarios they recognise. In this sense, training isn’t much different to anything else in life. Have you ever had a conversation with someone where the topic completely bored you? Chances are, you don’t remember much of what was said. But if you enjoy a chat with friends about topics that you identify with, you’ll remember those conversations a lot better.
Tailor training to different business areas
While it’s great that you can tailor online training to your business, what if you’re a larger organisation? Many companies have a clear demarcation between business areas, and often the work they do is extremely different. So, it doesn’t make sense to send your warehouse staff to the same training as your sales team. Customised online training courses can be created for all of the unique parts of your business.
Think about ways you can create online training courses that are department-specific, and you’ll usually experience much more engagement from staff. Again, it comes down to relevance. Relevant, engaging training connects with people much more than topics that can’t be linked to someone’s daily work.
Higher expectations from staff
Finally, company-branded training tends to have a bigger impact, especially for newer staff. Think about the onboarding process. You’ve got some new recruits, and you need to train them in how your company operates. Rather than send them to generic soft-skill courses, if you provide them with company-branded training courses to complete, they feel a much higher obligation to participate fully and really learn. There’s an element of feeling like their job depends on learning the content.
So, you’ve seen all the benefits of creating your own online training courses. Now, all you need to do is link up with a training provider and start the process. Your teams will thank you!
