A Short Guide For Selecting Ideal Custom eLearning Content

Outsourcing can be a daunting affair for many business owners. Handing over control of an aspect of your business to a bunch of strangers has real risks associated with it.

This is especially true when it comes to development of training content. Giving someone else the command of producing content that will be used to train your employees for months to come should not be taken lightly.

Choosing the wrong elearning content vendor can be an expensive mistake. After giving them weeks and months to produce your content (besides paying their costs), you may find that the produced content is simply not up to your standards.

To avoid such a mishap, it is crucial for businesses to be extremely careful while selecting their elearning vendors. To help you make the right decision, this article will guide you through the process of selecting the right partner for your elearning content development needs:

 

Start With Conducting Thorough Online Research

Most of our personal purchases start with online research, so why should finding an outsourcing partner be any different? Identify top brands in your space and conduct research into their online reviews, check out their websites, and their social media pages.

This would also be a good time to segregate generic training content developers from those that have carved out a niche for themselves. Depending on your needs and budgets, you can go forward with working with either. 

Generally speaking, niche specific content developers may be more expensive, but command great knowledge about training subjects relevant to a specific industry. On the other hand, generic content developers are perfect if you need content for an introductory course or a compliance training course.

 

Find Recommendations

Another great way to find dependable outsourcing partners is asking for recommendations from within your own network. These can come from anyone including family, a former colleague, or someone from your internal training team.

Recommendations are also usually accompanied by specific positive attributes that one may have identified during their experience with a vendor. This way, you can evaluate your choices on the basis of whether or not said attributes are important to your project.

 

Conduct Interviews

Selecting an outsourcing partner is very similar to hiring a resource. In fact, it is adding another set of resources to your business arsenal and hence, an interview is an absolute mandate.

However, since you are dealing with other businesses, this process may go a little differently. For instance, it is a good idea to send your prospective choices an email about your needs, asking them to schedule a call.

Alternatively, it is also a good idea to send them an email containing all the questions you have for them. This way, you can also judge their response time for future queries that you may have.

 

Review Case Studies

Studying case studies is a proven method of verifying the claims made by any business. However, this can be a little complicated in the case of elearning content providers as many of them provide whitelabel solutions and may be bound by non-disclosure agreements with their existing clients.

Even if that is the case, any business worth its salt will have at least a few examples of their work. If not, then it's better to move on to the next option.

 

Conclusion

Before concluding your search and coming to a decision, it is also a good idea to get pilot projects done from each of your final prospects. This way, you will be able to evaluate the efficiency with which they operate, along with the kind of communication and collaboration abilities you can expect from them.