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Why ready-made content is rarely used
Roman Mandrik, CEO of the SkillCup microlearning platform, expressed his opinion on the role of educational content providers. He noted the importance of adapting materials to modern learning requirements and user needs. In a rapidly changing world, the quality and availability of educational content are becoming key factors for successful learning. Microlearning, which offers short, targeted courses, enables effective acquisition of knowledge and skills, making it appealing to a wide audience. Companies often choose to develop their own training courses for economic reasons. An organization may already have a team of specialists dedicated to training employees, which implies ongoing costs for their salaries. Purchasing external content adds additional costs to the budget that cannot always be justified. Even when purchasing ready-made products proves more cost-effective, factors such as habit, inertia, and bureaucracy can hinder this decision. The speaker highlighted an important trend in recent years: companies are beginning to pay more attention to the authors of educational content. To ensure high-quality training, organizations prefer to purchase courses developed by renowned experts or create their own programs. In most cases, they will not be interested in a product created by unknown freelancers. This approach allows companies to guarantee the effectiveness and efficiency of their educational initiatives.
Roman points out another reason why online schools focus primarily on B2C rather than B2B sales. The B2B segment has its own unique legal nuances that must be taken into account. For example, it's critical for companies to collect analytics related to employee training. Simply providing access to courses is not enough; it's also crucial to properly register the rights to the content. This allows companies to control the use of materials and ensure compliance with internal standards and requirements.
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Large telecommunications companies often approach us with requests to purchase the rights to our Ilyakhov courses. We always respond that we can offer a price that will ensure our profitability for the next five years. This may prove significantly higher than our clients' expectations. From our perspective, there's no point in selling the rights to a product that generates income for us.
Roman believes there's an opportunity to create new startups that could act as intermediaries between online schools unwilling to sell the rights to their content and companies reluctant to send their employees to external platforms for training. Such buffer companies can help simplify the learning process by providing access to quality content without the need to transfer rights, which will make training more accessible and effective for businesses.
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Renting courses for corporate training: justified Is it an investment?
Corporate training is becoming a key element of successful business development. When deciding whether to rent courses to improve employee skills, several factors must be considered. Renting courses allows companies to save time and resources, as it eliminates the need to develop their own training programs. Professionally prepared courses offer relevant knowledge and skills that meet modern market demands.
A key advantage of renting courses is the ability to quickly access high-quality content developed by experts in their field. This allows organizations to quickly respond to industry changes and maintain competitiveness. Furthermore, renting courses provides flexibility: companies can choose the programs that best suit their needs and goals.
However, it's important to carefully select a course provider. It's essential to evaluate the quality of the materials, the level of instructors, and reviews from other organizations. It's also worth considering the training format: online or in-person, as well as the availability of practical classes and feedback.
Ultimately, renting courses for corporate training can be an effective solution for employee development and overall company productivity if you choose the right program and a reliable partner.
Vitaly Kurago, Head of Distance Learning Projects at the Rolf auto dealership, commented on Roman Mandryk's points from the perspective of a corporate training buyer. He noted that, in addition to economic factors, the wide range of course prices is an important aspect. Companies often face difficulty assessing whether a course costing 300,000 rubles is truly superior in quality to a course costing 30,000 rubles. This creates challenges when it comes to justifying a choice to management, explaining why it's worth investing in a particular course.
The market for ready-made electronic courses currently has no clear boundaries. There are many individual offerings, but a full-fledged market, like in the automotive industry, hasn't formed. A market is defined as a situation where you have a specific product, like a 2018 Volvo XC70, and you can easily determine its market value by analyzing data on platforms like Avito or Avto.ru.
In contrast, the e-course market resembles the situation with AvtoVAZ cars, where the price is determined by the owner and can vary. This creates uncertainty for buyers and makes it difficult to assess the true value of such courses. It's important to understand that successfully purchasing an e-course requires careful analysis, assessing the quality and reputation of the author to avoid disappointment and maximize the return on investment.
The speaker noted that ready-made content cannot always be used without prior adaptation. According to Vitaly, even a basic course, for example, on management skills, needs to be customized to suit the requirements of a specific company. Some course elements may require removal, others may need to be added, and some information may need to be modified to comply with corporate communication guidelines and management preferences. Adapting content will make it more relevant and effective for employee training.
Vitaly Kurago notes that even when a company begins collaborating with an online school and acquiring access to employee courses, only a small number of employees will actively participate in the training. Typically, these will be only those most motivated to develop their personal and professional skills.
Maria Moseeva, a gaming analyst at Labmedia, identified another barrier to using external educational resources. She noted that the difficulty of choosing from a vast number of sources becomes a significant challenge. Further difficulties arise from the difficulty of monitoring the quality of external content.
Maria believes that creating a corporate library including internal courses and verified external materials, such as video lectures, books, instructions, and articles, can be very useful. If training is requested, there will be no need to develop a program from scratch or rely on the effectiveness of ready-made products. Instead, you can use existing developments, adapting them to current needs. This will not only save time and resources, but also improve the quality of training, providing access to proven knowledge and tools.
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Corporate universities are reluctant to collaborate with EdTech for several reasons. First, many organizations prefer to develop their own learning platforms that better suit their internal needs and culture. This allows them to control the learning process and tailor content to specific business needs.
Second, a lack of information about the real benefits of EdTech solutions also hinders collaboration. Many corporate universities don't realize how technology can improve the educational process and increase the effectiveness of employee training.
Furthermore, some companies may be wary of the high costs of implementing new technologies and the lack of a guaranteed return on investment. This leads them to continue using traditional teaching methods, which may be less effective.
There is also the issue of integrating new technologies into existing systems, which requires time and resources.
Therefore, corporate universities prefer to act independently, which complicates cooperation with EdTech. The solution to this problem requires more active communication about the benefits of technology and demonstration of successful cases of implementing EdTech solutions in corporate training.
When it is wise to use external content
Maria Moseeva emphasized the importance of an ecological approach to information, arguing that one should not create new material if one can use existing material. In her opinion, the key criterion for choosing educational content is its compliance with the stated goal. If a training task can be effectively accomplished using materials from external sources, such as open sources like YouTube, then developing new programs from scratch becomes impractical. This approach saves resources and time and promotes more effective use of available information.
Elena Lbova, Head of the Corporate Academy at Pochta Bank, emphasized that the implementation of ready-made educational products significantly accelerates the solution of business problems compared to independently developing content. She noted that the company has two main methods for effectively using external resources for educational purposes. This allows for the optimization of training processes and the improvement of employee training, which in turn contributes to successful business development.
The first approach to solving educational problems using external resources emphasizes speed. A striking example is the "Accessible Coaching" project, implemented jointly with the Higher School of Economics, within which Pochta Bank employees undergo coaching sessions with HSE experts. This area is highly specialized, and creating a similar project within the company would have required significant effort: developing a methodology, selecting and training coaches. Turning to external partners allowed the company to save significant time and resources.
The second approach involves partially integrating external content into internal training programs. According to Elena, this method helps improve the quality of educational programs. Within this approach, three main ways of using third-party resources can be distinguished.
- An external element is included in an independently developed program. For example, an educational quest from a third-party provider or a highly specialized thematic module.
- Internal experts undergo training under an external program in order to then transfer the acquired competencies to other employees. Elena Lbova cited the "Mentoring" project as an example: the company's trainers were trained at the Russian representative office of the International Coaching Federation, received the relevant certificates, and then implemented a mentoring system in their company.
- External diagnostic tools are used in the development of internal programs. For example, certified tests for assessing the emotional state of employees or measuring their potential. According to the speaker, such tools help analyze the needs of trainees, align them with business goals, and ultimately build an effective development system.
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Measuring the Effectiveness of Business Training: Expert Opinions
The effectiveness of business training is a key factor in improving a company's productivity and competitiveness. Experts emphasize that a variety of methods and approaches are necessary to successfully evaluate the results of educational programs. Setting clear learning objectives is an important aspect, allowing you to determine how successfully employees are acquiring new knowledge and skills.
Common methods for assessing training effectiveness include surveys, testing, and analyzing employee performance before and after completing a course. Metrics such as productivity, engagement, and satisfaction also play a significant role in evaluating results. Experts recommend regularly reviewing and updating educational programs based on feedback to adapt to changing business needs.
It's important to remember that training is an ongoing process. Therefore, integrating modern technologies and methods, such as e-learning and microlearning, can significantly improve results. Evaluating training effectiveness should be objective and systematic, allowing companies to not only improve employee skills but also improve overall business performance.
Roman Mandrik noted that customers often request courses on relevant topics for which extensive information is available, including from open sources.
Companies regularly contact us with requests to develop information security courses for our platform. Every two weeks, we receive proposals for courses that include topics such as "Phishing with Attachments" and "Which Emails Should You Avoid Opening?" These topics are standard and appear in most requests. Companies want to customize them to their needs, adding individual elements. However, developing such content from scratch is impractical and ineffective. We believe that ready-made solutions can be easily purchased, saving time and resources. Roman emphasizes the importance of a branded course, designed with the company logo and colors, and featuring real-world examples. However, like Maria Moseeva, he advises not neglecting readily available resources such as YouTube, TED talks, and articles on the topic, which can be found for free or at a low cost. Roman emphasizes that knowledge takes precedence over course design and is the primary criterion for its value. The company's employees themselves can serve as a filter for the quality of the finished content. Specialists from various departments likely follow professional public pages and channels and subscribe to experts in their field. They can significantly influence the selection of external content. Their advantage lies in their deeper understanding of the subject area compared to T&D specialists, who select educational resources on various topics. Employees can offer more relevant and valuable materials, which in turn contributes to the improvement of the quality of educational programs and the development of professional skills within the company.
How to integrate external content into your program
Arthur Zakharyan, Strategy Director at WebSoft, emphasizes that integrating external resources into educational programs is primarily a methodological challenge. However, certain technical solutions can also be useful in achieving this goal. The use of technologies such as educational platforms and adaptive systems can help improve the learning process by providing access to high-quality external materials and resources. This will create a more diverse and effective learning environment that promotes the development of students' skills and knowledge.
- Seamless integration of external content with the LMS platform, other learning tools, and resources. When employees have to install multiple applications and use different logins and passwords for the library, course platform, and quiz service, the quality of such training decreases. Both students and training providers should be able to easily work with content, so it is much better when everything they need can be found in one place.
- Integrated learning analytics. To accurately evaluate the effectiveness of external content, data on its use should ideally be collected and analyzed in the same place where all learning analytics occurs.
- Efficient recommendation system. After collecting and analyzing data, you can create a recommendation system that integrates all content available to students, both internal and external. The ultimate solution is when the system takes into account user behavior and addresses their motivation. For example, if a student doesn't log into the platform for several days, they receive a message that a certain number of their colleagues have already completed a certain course—that is, the message "You're missing out on something important" is at work.
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