Learning How To Grow Your Training Business Faster
Increasing your speed to market means finding ways to do this in the most cost effective and efficient way possible without sacrificing quality. How? This is the million-dollar question (quite literally).
When it comes to producing online learning products, there are some relatively simple ways to streamline your design approach and production process to maximize business value, improve ROI, and ultimately increase revenue.
The secret lies in scalable, personalized eLearning. Scalable and personalized may seem opposed, but they don’t have to be if you have the right people, a solid strategic framework in place, effective production processes, and, fundamentally, the right technology.
Agency Or In-House?
First off, it’s worth considering investing more in your in-house skills to enable you to scale. Agencies definitely have a role, but if you’re working through hundreds of content hours, it may be more cost-effective to invest in your in-house skills. That way, you’ll spend less on production by upskilling an in-house team, and have much more alignment than is often possible with an agency.
Successful training providers we work with often end up with a mix, where they use agencies to create one-off products and in-house teams to focus on the scaling, adapting and iterating of learning content. This saves costs significantly compared to feeding change requests back to an agency.
“We’ve doubled the amount of people making eLearning whilst reducing costs by 50%.” - Sam Taylor, Digital Learning Manager, Tesco
Align Your Strategic Framework
Great digital learning products require thinking, planning, and cultivation. If we were to bottle up the traits of successful Elucidat customers, the first thing we’d see is that those who start with a clear strategy and process do much better. Some people roll their eyes at the idea of more processes and frameworks, but investing time in the right ones should make everyone’s lives easier and the outcomes significantly better.
As a leader in a training provider business, you need to take a critical look at how connected your business’ strategy and your learning design framework really are. If you have a framework that permeates from the boardroom right through to the production of a piece of microlearning, you’re going to be much more efficient in your product development and learning content production.
The 5C Framework
The 5C Framework for successful digital learning was designed to support both training providers and in-house Learning and Development teams creating just that. Apply each of the 5Cs within and across your organization to inform strategic and tactical operations:
- Capture.
How you understand your audience, undertake needs analysis and gain clarity on what success looks like. - Conceptualize.
How you design a learning experience that will engage your learners and meet their needs both now and in the future. - Create.
How you develop the most efficient, streamlined, and repeatable processes for building, reviewing and testing consistent products. - Cultivate.
How you evaluate performance of products and content, iterate, improve, and identify areas for innovation. - Commercialize.
How you produce, deploy, and manage online learning products that will sell; how you do this in a scalable way.
The Learning Technology Growth Stack
Going back to the Capture phase of the 5C framework, making the right learning technology choices relies on really understanding your learners. Your technology should enable your content to stay “alive” over time, supporting your learners as their needs evolve. Ultimately, get this right and you’re going to increase customer retention, get more referrals and be the rocket fuel to increased revenue. Get it wrong, and you’ll be stuck with static content that’s difficult to update and clunky for end-users to navigate.
Learners expect joined up experiences – not just standalone content.
Next Generation Learning Technology
Do you want learners to use your learning content once as a means to an end, or become a place they voluntarily come back to again and again? If the latter, then you need to consider the full user experience. If the former, think again... there are savvy providers out there planning to do to the training industry what Love Film did to Blockbuster, and what Uber’s done to taxis and Airbnb to traditional travel.
To keep learners hooked and engaged, think about how your technology stack could:
- Simplify and ensure flexible distribution and access.
- How will your content be hosted and accessed?
- Can your learners access the learning on any device?
- Is your eCommerce built in so you can sell to customers on the spot?
- What capabilities does your LMS have? Does it have features that cater to the specific needs of training providers?
- Curate and serve up existing content that’s relevant to your learners’ needs.
- Check out Anders Pink as a great online content curation tool that can be embedded into your learning.
- Filtered.com is a great example of a training provider that’s nailed learning content curation and personalization.
- Include social learning.
- Can you build in a sense of connectedness with community forums, polls, and social sharing?
- Use tools such as social polling.
- Explore collaboration and sharing tool.
- Integrate some kind of reward mechanism.
- Bring in gamification, such as badges or leaderboards.
Adopt New Authoring Software To Accelerate Growth
A great authoring tool is often the unsung hero of effective digital learning. How you deliver your content is vital—which is why it’s important to choose the right LMS—, but unless your learning content is accessible and engaging... it’s going to flop.
When it comes to the Create, Cultivate, and Commercialize aspects of the 5C Framework, there are some nightmares that come back time and time again to haunt eLearning teams – from version control to dealing with translations. Given that these issues often come down to limitations of technology, it’s not surprising that 48% of learning professionals want to change the tools they’re using (Brandon Hall 2016).
Smooth out these issues and you’ll see a much faster speed to market, with more products and a very happy CFO.
Related articles:
1. Going Digital: How To Grow Your Training Business
2. 3 Powerful Strategies To Create Learner Engagement In The 21st Century
3. 4 Ways To Deliver Big Learning And Achieve Your Goals
4. Free eBook: How To Grow Your Training Business Faster, Smarter, And More Profitably
