It’s the age-old debate for any learning team: do we buy in off-the-shelf learning content or build our own from scratch?
For businesses like Greystar, the answer is both! Greystar expertly combined the convenience and speed of off-the-shelf content with the advantages of personalised, tailored in-house content, called Greystar Originals. Let’s explore what that looks like, along with how you can choose whether off-the-shelf content or resources created in-house are right for you.
When it comes to which content is best for your business, there’s no right or wrong answer. Some of the key benefits of in-house content include:
In-house content is great for covering those topics you just won’t find outside your own business - your unique processes, your culture and everything that makes your company yours. It’s also handy for sharing institutional knowledge and breaking down silos, opening up communication channels across your organisation.
In contrast, some of the benefits of opting for off-the-shelf content are:
On top of this, off-the-shelf content is useful for more universal topics, such as DEIB, wellbeing, leadership and soft skills, whereas in-house content can be created to align with your learning and comms strategy, which is unique to your company, your teams and your people.
As you can imagine, taking on the task of creating content in-house is no mean feat. But the good news is that even with a super streamlined team, it’s still possible to do it yourself! If you’re thinking about going it alone, some of the main things to consider are:
Understanding the full situation upfront will put you in a much better position to succeed with your combination of in-house and off-the-shelf content, whatever that looks like for you.
Let’s take a closer look at Greystar Originals. As of today, 52% of the assets now living in the Business School are Greystar Originals, showing how much employees love them!
Greystar started its learning journey by populating its Greystar Business School with high-quality off-the-shelf content by Hemsley Fraser, helping it get up and running quickly despite not having a huge L&D team.
However, Greystar quickly realised it had learning needs beyond what the off-the-shelf content could provide, relating to Greystar’s specific processes and roles, which required custom content.
That’s where Greystar Originals came in. Greystar’s L&D team worked closely with SMEs across the business to create short, sharp resources, such as short videos, to capture and share knowledge. For instance, one employee was identified as a spreadsheet whizz, so they would create videos sharing how they completed certain tasks to help their colleagues improve their own Excel skills.
In fact, before long, Greystar found that its Greystar Originals were the most popular resources within its platform, helping fuel technical capability, skills and knowledge across the business. This original content was especially important for engaging Greystar employees throughout the global pandemic, as Greystar’s own processes were changing quickly. While off-the-shelf got them up and running on their learning journey quickly, in-house content was what really made the platform take off.
At 5app, we’re no strangers to off-the-shelf content. We partner with companies like Hemsley Fraser and All of Us to provide top-quality off-the-shelf content on a wide variety of business-critical topics, such as DEIB, leadership, project management, personal development, communication and more.
Looking for easy-access, affordable soft skills and leadership content? Find out more about 5app’s Plug & Play in collaboration with content experts Hemsley Fraser.
But all learning content is not made equal, and nobody wants to be left with a platform left gathering dust if your content isn’t inspiring or doesn’t resonate with employees. Even the best platform in the world will fight a losing battle against generic content, so these are the questions you need to ask before you sign on the dotted line with your content vendor:
Whether you choose in-house, off-the-shelf content or a mix of both, it’s vital that you pick a user-friendly platform that allows your L&D team to quickly manage and upload content. It’s often sensible to launch your platform with high-quality off-the-shelf content to get the ball rolling, and to create and upload additional in-house content when you’re up and running.
When you take the plunge and start building your own content, make sure you offer training to all relevant SMEs to help them create their assets, whether that’s a step-by-step guide to screen recording with narration, pointers for self-recording videos or how to design a quick elearning module with your authoring tool. You may also want to empower employees to create their own user-generated content (UGC) for even more efficient knowledge sharing, so the more user-friendly your systems are to use, the better. Alternatively, if you’re letting SMEs create content independently, ensure you have a comprehensive quality control process in place to maintain the standard of your content, no matter who’s making it.
The L&D team can also create templates to make it as quick and painless for SMEs to create content that looks great for a better user experience, and you can pull in AI tools to add transcripts, subtitles, voiceovers and tags to make content accessible and searchable.
Finding the balance between leveraging the low barriers to entry of off-the-shelf content and quality and personalised experience of in-house content is key to the success of your learning programme. No matter which you choose (and most likely, it’ll be both), make sure you pick a platform with in-built flexibility in case things change in the future.
A platform with in-built flexibility, you say…?