Every organization has some unique as well as some common training needs. These common needs can be fulfilled by making use of off-the-shelf training courses. One just needs to find a reputed e-learning company and get these courses deployed. But, what are these off-the-shelf courses? Why should we choose them? How to choose them? Keep on reading to know the answers to these questions.
The competition in the corporate sector has grown a lot in the past few years. In order to survive in this competition, your workforce needs to be developed professionally. This has made it mandatory for the organizations to invest in good employee training programs that will help not only in the development of the employee but also in the overall growth of the company. But, it is not an easy task to get the best-suited training program. You have the option of getting the course designed as per your requirements or you can go for off-the-shelf courses available in the market. These off-the-shelf courses prove beneficial for your general learning needs.
What are off-the-shelf courses?
When you decide to adopt e-learning for the training of your employee, you will come across the option of customized course. However, in order to get the course customized for your organization, you will have to invest a large amount of money and time as well. So, these courses prove beneficial only for the unique training needs of your company. When it comes to general needs, off-the-shelf courses come to your rescue. They can also be called as libraries already created by the e-learning companies and are ready to use. Most of these courses cover general topics like team management, communication skills, decision making, stress management, prevention of sexual harassment and many others. The team of experts including subject matter experts, instructional designers and developers work to get these courses designed. You can get all types of off-the-shelf courses in various formats that can run on any platform; whether desktop or mobile.
Why to choose off-the-shelf courses?
While choosing the e-learning courses, most of the companies often face the dilemma of whether to get a personalized course designed or to go for off-the-shelf solutions. So, let’s have a look at a few reasons why you should choose them for your common training requirements.
- Budget-friendly- One of the most important factors while choosing an e-learning course is the budget. Here, off-the-shelf courses get an edge over customized ones as these courses are less expensive. There are lots of options available in the market and hence, you can easily choose the one that fulfills your requirements and fits in the budget. Additionally, these courses do not need separate L&D team to work on their design, development and testing. So, your money to be spent on these resources is also saved.
- Standard content- Off-the-shelf training courses cover generic topics like time management, communication skills, customer care, team building, decision making and many others. The content of these courses is standard and can be applicable for any organization with a few or no changes. The subject matter experts work on the content carefully and the courses are developed considering the common training needs of the organizations.
- Time saving- If you have urgent training requirement, then building a customized course is surely not going to help as you need to spend a good amount of time on the process starting from finding out a good e-learning company, then discuss your needs, make the things work out accordingly and get the final, ready-to-use version. On the other hand, off-the-shelf are available in the market at any point of time and are ready-to-use. You just need to purchase and deploy them to your system which is again a very easy task. This saves you a great amount of time that can be utilized for other important activities.
- Easy to maintain- As mentioned earlier, off-the-shelf courses can be deployed easily without any hassle of changing the code of the company’s system. At the same time, these courses are built in such a way that they run smoothly on any device and any operating system. So, you need not to worry about having a particular type of device or operating system.
A few tips for choosing the best off-the-shelf course
Now that you have got familiar with the nature of the courses and their benefits, you must be thinking of using them for your organization. So, here are a few tips for choosing the best off-the-shelf course suitable for your requirements as well as budget.
- Know your audience- The focus of the training program is on the learners. It is important to see what knowledge the learner gains rather than how the course is designed. This means that, while buying the course, first you need to know your target audience in a better way. Consider their age, position in the company and depending upon that focus on their learning requirements. Here, it is important to note that, the younger employees are more familiar with internet usage and hence, they will not have any difficulty even if the course is online or offline. However, the older generation will take time to adjust. So, the course you are implementing must be comfortable for the both type of employees.
- The course should be mobile friendly- The usage of smartphones has increased significantly in past few years. It is better to look for courses that are mobile friendly. This is will provide you and the employees with an added advantage as they can be able to access the course at anytime from anywhere and you will not have to allot special place and time for the training purpose.
- Choose the right service provider- There are many e-learning development companies available in the market that provide off-the-shelf courses. However, you need to be watchful while making the choice. Read the reviews about the company you are about to choose in order to be assured of their reliability. When you meet them ask them many questions to know more about the type of courses they provide and the technology they use. Also, see if they are ready to make the changes as per your needs and provide the quick service if something goes wrong in future.
- Take the trial- Ask the provider for access to the trial version of the course you are going to deploy and present it to a small team of employees including managers as well. Once they go through it, take their feedback and convey it to the provider in order to get the changes done. This will also help you understand if the course runs properly on your Learning Management system or not.
If you follow these steps, you will surely get the best off-the-shelf course as per your requirements and you will be able to achieve your learning goals seamlessly.
This is all about off-the-shelf learning courses. If you are looking for off-the-shelf courses based on POSH (Prevention of sexual harassment), Stress Management, Giving Feedback, Decision Making, Communication Skills or any other generic topic, visit us at https://www.posiviewtech.com.
