Getting off the content treadmill

If you work in an LMS role or content creation or curation, we know the pressure of continuously supplying relevant and quality courses can be a point of stress. It can feel like you must keep working at breakneck speeds to meet your organization’s short-term needs, leaving you with little time to create new courses  around topics that accomplish long-term organizational goals. Is this feeling you have? This is known as the “content treadmill”. But how can an L&D professional keep up with amount of course content they need to create when under budgetary and time pressure? If you find yourself on the content treadmill, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your current course content supply and decision-making method.

In poll taken during OpenSesame and ATD’s webinar, “Buy or build: what’s right for your training program?” featuring Donald Taylor, Chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, when L&D professionals were asked what the biggest challenge of being an L&D professional is, the most common response was “lack of time”.

Content curators today feel under pressure to provide training content that is high quality and fulfill brand guidelines, but feel stymied in doing so due to time constraints and the sheer volume of content needed. Modern learning managers not only have to supply mandatory organizational trainings, but also informative content that contain new information about products or technology that is to be consumed quickly and then, possibly irrelevant in a short time period.

To provide the amount of content your organization needs at a cost that is reasonable, purchasing off the shelf course content from vendors, such as OpenSesame, can be the most cost effective and time sensitive method of doing so. With amount of information the average organization needs continually increasing, L&D professionals need to provide the most modern information to its learners. Courses become outdated at a much faster pace and you alone may not be able to create internally the relevant content their organization needs.

Buying a previously curated set of courses allows L&D professionals like you to save money in cost of production, maintenance (such as content updates and localization), and the opportunity cost of your time. A set of curated courses makes it possible for different roles within an organization to receive material that is relevant to them without having the material be created internally.

This method of providing course content for your organization saves time for you to focus their efforts on improving performance and engagement with their learners.

OpenSesame offers the most comprehensive catalog of elearning courses from the world’s top publishers. For more information, please contact us at info@opensesame.com.