Giving your employees the right e-learning solution is more or less like going to shop for clothing. One size cannot fit all making the approach a null one. Having a ready, off-the-shelf product can be cheap in terms of the initial purchase, but may not result in the best return on interests or give the best for the knowledge and skills needed by your organisation. Here are some benefits of custom e-learning development can offer for your company. 

1. Meaningful, Familiar Content

Suppose your organisation has the strategic goal of increasing sales by 5% in a financial year and you have identified the key skills which will help your employees in reaching this goal. One option would be purchasing an existing course package that teaches the skills. However, using actual case studies from your employees can help you align their skills with the process. With custom e-learning, content development can rely on actual real-life situations so as to make it more meaningful and familiar so that the learning can be immediately applied on the job.

2. Cost-effective, Efficient Upgrading

Once you have put away the initial investment, it should now be easy, quick and inexpensive to upgrade your custom learning content. Professional instructional designers and content developers can come up with and organise your training solution so as to allow for quick, easy and cheap editing and maintenance. With custom learning, you can also amend content any time it is necessary without having to wait for new releases. With just these reasons, you get to have a greater return on your investments that generic, pre-built e-learning courses.

3. Alignment with Brand Image and Values

Custom learning gives you an opportunity to grow and improve your brand and values. For instance, you can customise the learning package so that it has a custom theme with corporate colours and logo. This makes the learning material instantly recognisable as an asset which is part of your organisation. The content can be created to reflect corporate values while enabling you to have enough commitment for implementation. Having a custom package that the learners can relate to makes them closer to the course content and they will be more likely to remember something that looks familiar as compared to something that comes in a bland, general package.

4. Specific, Targeted Assessments

The process of assessment is very important for finding out if your learning has been a success and helpful as a measure of ROI. Directional feedback clearly states what is going well and what is not going well with the training. This way, the learners can learn what should have been done and they can retain their fundamental lessons for much longer. A custom training package can be aimed at determining whether the learner understands certain key concepts and this can be known by carrying out targeted assessments which are specific and can give you a lot of insight into how much they understand.

5. Improved Engagement and Motivation

Learner motivation and engagement is usually influenced by a number of factors which include how direct and meaningful the learning material is to the learner, the structure and length of topics as well as the overall course. With customisation, you can easily control all these aspects thus making changes over time to reflect an evolving group of learners. Feedback from the learners can also be used in improving the content that they are learning from thus making the entire experience an ever-changing and constantly upgrading package.

6. Support Future Innovation

Last but not least, current trends in education and technology are pointing to a future where learning is a personalised, learner-centric experience. Take for instance supported learning where the environment changes to adapt to the needs and inputs of the learner thus providing a stimulating discovery and learning process. Custom e-learning is one huge step in this direction where in-depth design can put learners in control of their own learning experience.

At the end of the day, getting your employees to learn on the job can be a tough undertaking. You have to understand their needs and their capabilities before you can drop generic content on them. By taking the time to come up with custom learning content for their needs (which can be done in 4 stages), you will have taken them a step ahead by empowering them to do more and innovate more thus leading to huge cost savings for the company.