Today’s work environment presents more challenges to employees than ever before. Increasingly complex technologies combined with more stringent regulatory rules have forced employers to rethink strategies for ensuring their workers have the knowledge and skills they need to succeed. The term often used for this training imperative is “upskilling”, which refers to the programs and activities implemented by an organization to support employee training and development.
Once a company makes the decision to implement an upskilling program, it needs to determine a strategy to for creating or acquiring the courses and content it will need to support a comprehensive training curriculum.
Upskilling Courses: Build vs Buy
There are essentially two methods available for creating your upskilling course library: you can build the courses from scratch, or you can build ready-made courses (often referred to as “off-the-shelf courses).
If you choose to build the courses from scratch, there are several challenges to consider:
Cost
It is estimated that creating a single one-hour course from scratch can cost up to $15,000. And while this may seem reasonable, it can be cost-prohibitive if your company plans to build a complete library of courses, covering a variety of upskilling topics.
Timeframe
It is also estimated that the development of a single one-hour course can take up to 300 hours to develop. This time requirement can eliminate the possibility of building a library of courses from scratch if your goal is to start upskilling your employees as soon as possible.
Expertise
Even if you can tolerate the expense and timeframe required to develop your upskilling library from scratch, it is unlikely that your company has all of the in-house talent and expertise required to address the wide array of topics to be addressed in an upskilling program.
The Benefits of Off-the-Shelf Upskilling Courses
As the need for employee upskilling has increased, so too has the number of vendors with offerings to support these programs. Some of these vendors now offer off-the-shelf courses as an alternative to building your own courses from scratch.
Working with off-the-shelf courses eliminates the challenges listed about in that:
Your company can access a full range of upskilling courses at a fraction of the cost it would take to build them from scratch
You can access these courses immediately, rather than having to wait many months
It provides a great way to gain access to subject matter experts (SMEs) with specific knowledge for each topic of interest
In addition, some off-the-shelf course vendors will allow you to rebrand and customize their courses to reflect your own corporate branding and meet the specific training needs of your organization.
LMS Portals: Off-the-Shelf Courses to Upskill Employees
At LMS Portals, we offer our clients and partners with a SaaS-based, multi-tenant learning management system (LMS) to build, deliver, manage, and track an online employee upskilling program. LMS Portals provides a multi-tenant architecture, which allows an administrator to launch and manage a dedicated online training environment (portal) for each of your unique training audiences.
We also offer a complete library of off-the-shelf courses, covering most every aspect of employee upskilling and development.
Contact us today to get started or visit our Partner Program pages