Partnerships in business are a delicate dance.
They give us the opportunity to break into new markets, generate more sales, and target new customers. Their success is quite literally your success and their loyalty to your organization is solely dependent on the experience they have with it.
Think of a tango: where one person takes the lead into each step and the other is trusting their guidance – partnerships are the same way. One mis-step, mistake, or scratch of the CD could cost the whole dance, or worse – your partner’s trust.
Now imagine a quirky, shy middle-schooler trying to lead a tango (yeah, we went there) – they lack confidence, forget the steps, and somehow simultaneously trip all over their partner’s feet. That person is going to end up getting chosen last as a partner for the foreseeable future.
Relaying this back to business partnerships, if customers and partners begin to feel their learning programs are lacking synergy, structure, tailored experiences, and ease of use, they will not feel confident in the business they are doing with you. It’s a slippery slope, and one that can cost your bottom line enormously.
- eLearning challenges for Learning and Development (L&D)
- You’ll like the sound of this – off-the-shelf eLearning content
- eLearning courses – where they at, though?
- Make them feel like dancing – online content for corporate learning
E-learning challenges for Learning and Development (L&D)
So with all of the above said, how do you make sure your organization never gets picked last to lead the tango? A lot of mis-steps happen at the admin level that are easy to correct. Let’s re-evaluate our old song and dance by looking at where the struggles begin.
- For better, not worse – your partnerships
We’ve all heard the old saying before: it’s business, it’s not personal. The trouble is, though, that if the business of learning isn’t made personal, learners won’t tune in.
When your learners are not tuned in and engaged with relevant training content, the learning program ceases to prove any ROI. For external use cases, this is detrimental to your relationships with customers or channel partners who are taking the hit and looking to your L&D department for answers.
For those of us in the training industry, these relationships are put at risk when we are not able to deliver. We all want to avoid having to do the professional equivalent of holding a jukebox outside in the rain and asking for another shot, but more than that, we want our corporate training programs to be a success.
(Don’t worry, we’re getting to the good part)
- Getting personal – (at scale)
One of the biggest e-learning challenges for L&D is curating personalized content for larger audiences. This is especially true when trying to create successful online content for corporate learning programs in external use cases.
This used to be really difficult (and time consuming).
For example, can we all just take a moment to appreciate the tender loving care that went into making a mixtape of different songs back in the day for a special someone — you’d hassle with iTunes (or Torrent sites if you were a rebel), spend hours to find those perfect songs, burn the physical CD, and if you really liked the person, you put together some form of (probably botched) cover art to slap on the finished product.
Doing this for one or two people was a lengthy project, but doable. Trying to make individual mixes for your whole friend group was an entirely different story.
We spent so much time trying to make sure the content landed perfectly, because if the mixtape didn’t vibe well with them after all of that work, the CD would be doomed to exile in a dusty case or worse: the junk drawer — foiled!
Take this (very cringey) experience and think about the people who drive the ROI for e-learning courses: learning admins.
It’s challenging for admins to tailor content for learners who they may not even know, the same way you would not want your wedding DJ picking out every song that plays on your big day.
The danger here too enlies that if admins are pushing content that is generic and irrelevant to the needs and interests of their various audiences, learners will not want to spend time on their platform.
The same way that newlyweds may not all want DJ’s to play the Cha-Cha Slide at their reception (shocking, we know), a one size fits all approach to learning content also does not exist.
If admins are wasting time creating courses and pulling in content that is ultimately left untouched in the system, your LMS platform and instructional design may not prove their ROI, or be as cost effective as they could be.
Technology has made life much simpler and we are able to accomplish so much more now in even less time than ever before. Making personalized playlists for people instead of burning CD’s, for example, is way easier nowadays with the help of technology like Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, etc.
With more technological advances than ever, why then are so many Learning and Development (L&D) professionals having to curate learning content like they are still living in the early 2000’s? If you could give them the tools to create personalized e-learning content at scale (even for external audiences) without sacrificing the majority of their time, why wouldn’t you?
Where is this fine solution, you might ask? *clears throat*
L&D Teams, we’d like to formally introduce you to your new best friend: Docebo Content (please see visual below for likely side effects).
Related: The critical importance of the learner experience in e-learning
You’ll like the sound of this – off-the-shelf e-learning content
Music to your partner’s ears: external personalization at scale. Like we mentioned earlier, this is where a lot of your learning program’s ROI is getting lost. But hey, now – no need to queue the breakup songs just yet.
With Docebo Content, a full catalog of fresh and mobile ready content is just as good as a bouquet of roses (better, actually), and can be reached right at their fingertips.
We’re offering new industry specific courses that make it easier for your partners and customers to engage their workforce with content that is as specific, tailored, and on-demand as their favorite Spotify playlist.
Docebo Content allows you to grow your network without burdening your admins and managers with finding the right content at the right time to maintain those business relationships that we depend on so much.
These specific training courses are designed to align with their job and skill sets. What this means is that right from within your learning management system (LMS), your various audiences can choose from over thousands of relevant off-the-shelf training materials from over 100 content providers. All of this without burdening admins with the task of creating and maintaining custom e-learning content for your scaling learning programs.
We want to get learners dancing to the beat of their own drum – learner autonomy is the key to increasing learner engagement which drives your bottom line. With that said comes more good news: e-learning courses can now be sourced, queued, saved, and shared with peers by the learners themselves.
We are here to help you establish trust between your brand and your partners with a user experience that makes it easier for learning content to stay on repeat. A lot of what this means, though, is making it easier to source those courses to begin with. Solution: take out the middle men and women – your admins.
Related: How to personalize learning with artificial intelligence
E-learning courses – where they at, though?
We know it sounds too good to be true but there’s just no other way around it: finding the right content has genuinely never been easier. Learners can now browse through the Docebo Content catalog or search for the courses they need to take learning into their own hands.
Without admin intervention, your learners can even curate playlists that house their favorite content. The great part about this is that you’re cutting out unnecessary steps for admins to drive engagement and for learners to start learning.
By allowing your learners to find the right materials that inspire their own personal and professional development, their learning experiences will seamlessly flow without any more tedious deposits from your admins. Without skipping a beat, you can get your learners engaged, and kiss old school content crowdsourcing goodbye.
Related: Personalized learning at scale? Enter the virtual coach
Make them feel like dancing – online content for corporate learning
External audiences are special but they can be tricky without the right resources. Our admins do not always know these learners which makes personalizing their learner experience challenging.
With the amount of resources that organizations pour into learning, it’s not a good look when learners are disengaged or not even visiting their university. It can decay trust, ROI, and reduce the value that customers feel they’re getting out of the partnership.
Docebo’s off-the-shelf e-learning content gives partners autonomy in the personalization of their experience. They now have a unique opportunity to find what works best for them and the resources to support that. Learners get to be the DJ while also rocking it on the dance floor, so to speak. We encourage you to watch how the positive business impact of your flourishing partnerships drive your bottom line.
To put it simply, when learners are listening, you have the opportunity to continue to develop trust with customers and channel partners. It’s a necessity, you want them dictating their own content playlists without admins having to guess, plug in, and press play.
In summation, learning does not need to feel different from piecing together high ranking Spotify playlists and, honestly, there’s no reason for your program to be the Nickelback of learning programs anymore.
Consider us your new and improved knight in shining LMS armour (offering off-the-shelf courses). If the challenges above sound all too familiar, we now invite them to be a thing of the past.
Welcome to Docebo Content – learning has never sounded better.
Ready to enrich your existing content collection or jumpstart your training program with Docebo Content? Talk to an expert today!