The Importance Of Corporate Training Market Growth For Online Learning Content Providers
According to Research and Markets, "the global eLearning market is poised to grow at a CAGR of around 7.2% over the next decade to reach approximately $325 billion by 2025." In addition, the online corporate training market is expected to grow by 13% per year, with 77% of U.S. companies offering online training to improve the development of their employees.
There are lots of other mouth-watering facts about the continued growth and adoption in this sector. Whether you are in the business of content creation or learning management technology, this is all good news for learning businesses. However, for learning businesses distributing training materials and services to the corporate market, there are core requirements which are critical for continued growth, scale, and profitability.
Some of these include the ability to:
- White label and customize content for each corporate client.
- Provide single sign-on (SSO) for seamless login and access from employee portals.
- Segment engagement reporting to monitor employee cohorts.
- Offer custom roles for corporate managers to see specific data easily.
- Extend easy integration points to client technology stacks.
- Manage licenses, content access, and user management.
To truly scale learning, content providers need the ability to deploy and manage a large volume of partnerships with only a few clicks. It would be virtually impossible to perform custom implementations for each corporate client, so businesses providing this type of offering need an easier way to scale.
Choosing Technology To Help You Scale
At Thought Industries, we work with a lot of organizations who are seeing tremendous growth opportunities in this area but are held back by technological debt. In that we mean, a homegrown platform typically can’t offer complex features needed to grow at the pace of the market. Or organizations that have chosen an LMS, or a collection of software products, which are not designed to cater to changing business models. Corporate customers are also becoming more demanding, looking for more cloud services, white-labeled delivery, better reporting and better connections with their internal technologies such as Salesforce and HCM systems.
Technology aside, there is also an opportunity to diversify the product offerings to give clients and potential clients more options and better service. Here are a few examples of ones we see in operation:
- Basic seat licensing: The corporate customer acquires a certain number of licenses and makes those available to employees, who take courses alongside others with similar professional interests but from different companies and may interact online with those individuals.
- Branded licensing: The corporate customer acquires a subscription with the stipulation that it's branded only for their employees. Those employees proceed to take courses only alongside other employees within the same organization.
- Interoperability licensing: It may be that your clients already have a learning application they prefer to use. With the use of interoperability standards (SCORM being the most common one), they can pull in your content and run it on the course delivery platform of their choice.
Advantages Of Branded Learning Experiences
The overall idea is to give each corporate customer unique access and a branded experience, but also the power to make changes and track users. The advantages of this approach from the customer side are:
- They can deliver targeted online learning content that's already been vetted by employees to some or all of the organization.
- A well-designed online learning platform provides functionality that will enable managers and employees to track progress in the training program.
- That same platform will also allow employers the ability to recognize the accomplishments of their staff for certification and advancement.
- Typically, seat licensing is more cost-effective to companies because the pricing is discounted for volume purchase.
The benefits to you add up too:
- Sales tend to be much larger.
- Renewals tend to be more consistent year over year.
- Exposure of your learning content broadens to many more users, who will often transport their trusted training habits and resources to new employers.
The only obstacle preventing learning content providers from taking advantage of licensing opportunities is often the commitment to the sales strategy and limitations of their technology. When both are leveraged appropriately, licensing content can have a significant impact on bottom-line revenue. For large organizations with a large body of content and existing relationships with customers and partners, adopting a licensing strategy can truly transform a business and open up new revenue streams.