Off-The-Shelf Self-Paced Courses For Employee Development
While running a business, you must pay special attention to employee development at every turn. In this regard, you may have also considered whether you should go for an off-the-shelf eLearning course or design new online courses.
What Is An Off-The-Shelf Course? What Is A Self-Paced Course?
Off-the-shelf eLearning courses are ready-made courses that you can use for your employee development. You can effectively add it to your existing program for employee training. It is different from customized courses as you do not have to create it all by yourself. You would neither require an outside vendor nor an internal team to create the courses.
By self-paced course, we refer to a learning method where an employee is not being pressured to complete a course at a certain moment. In simple words, there is no timeline given to complete the sessions. Everyone can proceed at their own pace with these eLearning courses. This method is quite different from traditional classroom courses where strict deadlines are usually imposed on the trainees. So, in this article, we are going to discuss how the off-the-shelf self-paced online learning method is the best program for employee training and skill development.
The Benefits Of Off-The-Shelf Self-Paced eLearning Courses
Here are the benefits you can get from the off-the-shelf online learning courses instead of choosing the customized ones.
1. It Is Flexible
It is highly necessary to allot some learning time to develop any particular skill. However, it may not be possible for every employee to study at a certain time every day. They have workload and performance pressure to handle as well. Therefore, if you engage them in a training program that they have to attend, it may make things complicated and highly stressful for them. On the other hand, if you introduce an off-the-shelf self-paced course, they can get the most out of it. They can acquire the most knowledge as they can learn at a convenient time which helps them absorb everything faster and better.
2. Easy To Adapt
The main thing with off-the-shelf online learning courses is that it is designed for everyone. Everyone can understand the lessons without having much difficulty. The duration of the lessons plays a huge part in this. The course duration isn’t massive enough to easily bore the learner. It contains short spans thus employees can understand any topic better in one go. Moreover, these courses are created in a way that helps the learner revise everything very easily. One can go through previous lessons without spending too much time or getting bored.
3. Saves A Lot Of Time
It is no wonder that opting for an off-the-shelf online training course will save you tons of time. Creating the course on your own will take more than just having a team. A lot of planning and hard work will be involved there. You will have to plan everything and thus require a lot of time. On the other hand, eLearning content providers have ready-made training courses which you can start using immediately. Some organizations have a team to create the courses internally, but employee courses do not always need customization. The off-the-shelf skill development training covers the basics. So, it is more than appropriate and time-saving.
4. Cost-Effective Solution
Going for customized courses will involve a lot of costs whether you have an internal team or a vendor to design and create it. Not every organization wants to spend that much on training courses. That is why off-the-shelf courses are highly encouraged for skill development and self-paced learning. It helps in cutting down the budget.
5. Accessibility
You can get lifelong access to ready-made online training courses. All you must do is renew the contract every year and keep enjoying the content. In this way, you can have it for a lifetime which enables your employees to access it anytime. Moreover, these courses are designed in such a format that someone can access them from any device.
6. Result-Driven Approach
The off-the-shelf self-paced learning courses are designed in a way that will help your employees remember better and longer term. The courses use both interactive and microlearning methods. Also, it contains polls, surveys, and quizzes which help the learners memorize important information easily.
Should You Go For It?
There are various benefits associated with these learning courses in terms of time, money, employee engagement, a good learning environment, and many more. Therefore, it is the best thing to keep the development of your employees going. Off-the-shelf self-paced online learning courses offer a compelling solution for employee development and skill acquisition. Their flexibility, adaptability, time-saving nature, cost-effectiveness, accessibility, and engagement-driven approach make them a valuable asset for any organization.
