5 reasons you should use ready-made online training courses for employees

Nobody knows the needs of your business better than you, that’s true. Not many people out there can tell you exactly where the knowledge gaps are in your team and how these affect performance. You also know your KPIs better than anyone else.

Then what’s the point of using ready-made online training courses for employees?

Making courses from scratch takes a lot of time, money, and effort. And more often than you’d have thought, the content you want to create already exists — in the content library of your LMS.

When you need to train your staff fast, effectively, and without breaking your budget, ready-made online training courses can be your best resource.

Why ready-made courses are a good solution for training employees

There are many benefits to using ready-made online courses for employee training, either as a standalone training program or to complement your current one.

Let’s explore five of the most important reasons why you should consider training employees with off-the-self online courses:

1. Reduce training costs

Let’s start with the most important reason to use ready-made online training courses first: the cost. Building your own courses from scratch requires various resources in time and money.

• First, you need to make a content plan based on your research, the needs of your team, and the KPIs you want to improve.
• Next, you have to write and produce the content or hire a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to create it for you.
• Finally, you have to bundle that content together to create a course. You have to figure out how best to divide your courses into digestible chunks and upload them into your LMS.

This whole process is not necessarily difficult. But it will take both time and money. And sometimes, the sheer investment of hours and $$ you’ll have to put in creating online courses on your own may be enough to discourage you.

Using ready-made online training courses, however, is a whole other game.

Purchasing ready-made courses is more affordable and much less labor-intensive. You save a ton of time creating and uploading the content: everything is already there, ready to go. Which means you can start your training sooner and start hitting those KPIs.

That’s money saved already.

Meet TalentLibrary™
A growing collection of ready-made courses that cover the soft skills
your teams need for success at work

2. Bring more expertise to your training

When creating online training courses for employees, you want to make sure that the level of knowledge the courses will provide are top-notch. Anything else is just not worth your time and investment.

Yet a good Subject Matter Expert can be hard to find. Let alone finding several of them so that you can create your online training courses.

Sure, there will be enough knowledge and expertise within your team to populate some content verticals. People from your team can create courses based on their specific niche. But there will likely be some gaps, or a fluctuation in quality, especially if content creation is not their primary job. Besides, sometimes you’ll want to offer training courses on new topics or add some fresh content.

This is where ready-made courses can help: a good LMS content library by default contains a vast array of subjects, all written and reviewed by experts. It’s like having a whole university’s worth of lecturers, instead of having to rely on one or two content-specific instructors (no matter how good they may be).

Doesn’t that set your mind at ease?

3. Help employees retain information

One of the things that’s become very clear lately, especially during this remote working Renaissance we’ve been experiencing, is that people can be overwhelmed by too much information.

Co-founder and CEO of Cultivate Joseph Freed, explains in this Forbes article how important it is to be aware of employees’ cognitive load. Especially as digital communication keeps increasing, employees can suffer from burnout more frequently and find it difficult to retain information.

Online training courses for employees need to be short in order to be effective. And that may be tough to manage when you’re creating your content by yourself. For example, if you already have some lengthy PDFs and manuals, how could you break them down into brief training courses?

If you opt for ready-made courses, though, you’ll know their length beforehand and pick the ones that fit your employees’ learning needs.

Each course in TalentLibrary™, for instance, is made up of mini-lessons between 2-3 minutes each. Grouping information like this reduces cognitive load so your employees are more likely to complete training, enjoy it, and use their newly-acquired skills at work.

4. Focus on soft skills

Developing hard skills is necessary when training employees. But hard skills can be limited in scope.

Did you know, for instance, that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet? This Gallup article paints a clear picture of the importance of behavioral skills, or soft skills when it comes to staff training.

Skills like creative thinking, positivity, and adaptability are closely tied to high performance and crucial to foster in a fast-changing market. But they’re often overlooked. Because you can easily build training content around your product — and it makes sense to build that content in-house — but creating a course on communication skills or resilience is more time-consuming.

Luckily, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Or, waste time to build something from scratch when there’s already relevant content out there. You can easily deliver soft skills training through ready-made online training courses and equip your teams to remain strong in the future.

No matter what 2030 throws at you.

5. Stay on top of industry trends and needs

Speaking of the fast-changing market: how will you know what your online training courses for employees should look like tomorrow? Or the next month? Or the next year?

According to this Training Industry article, it’s wise to have a data-driven approach to updating training content. You should take the time to look at all the courses in your catalog and compare the performance metrics for each: the number of completions/drop out rate, how they’ve pushed your KPI’s forward etc. And once in a year, or even once every six months, you should reshuffle your content to make sure your training is still relevant.

Plus, depending on your industry, there may also be compliance training topics you’ll need to update, to make sure your team is on top of the latest regulations.

But doing all that, although wise and necessary… is also a lot of work.

If, instead, you use ready-made online training courses for employees, then you’ll have the advantage of an LMS content library that keeps updating automatically. In TalentLibrary™, for instance, new courses are available every quarter to keep up with market trends.

Conclusion

Going the route of ready-made online training courses can save you a lot of time, money, and the headache of figuring out best practices. You can rest assured that your team has access to top-notch content from a vast array of SMEs and that this content is delivered in an optimal way. That way, you can focus on the things that really matter.

Not sure where to start? For a growing collection of ready-made courses that cover the soft skills your teams need for success at work, check out TalentLibrary™ If you already have a TalentLMS account, you can simply add TalentLibrary™ to your plan and start delivering online training courses to your teams on a wide range of topics.