Why Pick Custom eLearning Over Catalog Courses for Industry-specific Training

Most organizations today understand the importance of eLearning and the benefits it offers for both to the organization and to the learners: on-demand access to training material, better instructional design, reduced delivery costs, rapid course delivery across multiple platforms, consistent global training and so on. However, organizations that belong to a wide array of industries still struggle with one thing when it comes to eLearning: whether to pick catalog (off-the-shelf) online courses or a custom eLearning solution.

In this blog, we will learn why organizations who have industry-specific training needs must choose custom eLearning over generic, off-the-shelf-courses.

1. Satisfy Specific Training Needs with Custom eLearning

Different industries have different training needs, built around specific learning objectives for their learners. Catalog or off-the-shelf courses – although ready to use and relatively cheap, offer generic learning content. They are not crafted to address the unique needs of the organization or learner.

On the other hand, custom eLearning offers courses whose learning objectives are tightly aligned with the goals of the organization and to their workflow, making the training much more efficient. This is quite significant in industries such as manufacturing, retail and FMCG, pharmaceutical and healthcare, finance and insurance, and so on where you want learners to follow standard operating procedures and processes.

2. Create Relevant Courses for Learners

Is it important that your learners realize the training content is applicable to them and their jobs? Most eLearning experts would say that it is quite difficult for learners to be interested in training that is directly not relevant to their work. Generic/catalog courses cannot demonstrate that the training is relevant to your learners. Custom eLearning, however, offers organizations a plethora of strategies to ensure that learners are offered content that is relevant, one they can readily apply to their jobs.

One such example is the ability to tie learning objectives to real-world scenarios, scenarios that emulate the workspace and the problems associated with it. Scenario-based learning, as it is referred to, in other words, is an instructional design strategy that provides learners with contextualized content to help them understand the training better and apply the knowledge more readily.

3. If Content Changes Over Time, Choose Custom eLearning

Most global organizations are dynamic entities i.e., they do not stick to one marketing or training strategy all the time. In order to survive in a competitive environment and stay relevant, it is imperative that organizations keep their learners up to date with the latest updates and information. This means that training content needs to be frequently updated and upgraded, to ensure training is relevant and suits the changing market conditions and technologies.

With custom eLearning, the course material can be changed as per the organization and their specific requirements, without introducing any extreme changes in the delivery mechanism. This saves a significant amount of time and courses can be churned out within challenging timelines.

4. Give Learners Access to Performance Support Solutions

It is possible to use custom eLearning resources to help learners perform complex tasks and processes on-the-job, without them ever having to seek external help. Employees can be offered continuous and just-in-time job-aids in the form of PDFs, short scenario-based videos, FAQs, tutorials and other multimedia elements which they can access on their smartphones or tablets.

For instance, if the sales force needs to brush up on the company policies or any product information, all they need to do is reach for their mobile devices and access the information on-the-go.

With custom eLearning, organizations can offer a relevant, learner-centric, and personalized learning experience to their learners. Tailoring to the specific needs of the organizations and the learners, custom eLearning provides a way to adapt the needs and inputs of the learner so that they can gain an increased understanding of the training content to better apply it in their jobs.