Online training providers: sink, swim or soar?

The explosion of the eLearning industry and the increasing needs of the modern learner for on-demand, accessible and personalized learning present a huge opportunity to training providers. The savviest are already leaving clear ground between themselves and their competition.

Training providers with an eye on the future recognize what’s being called for, and have already made the switch to digital. Keen to meet the demands of today’s learning audiences, they are stepping into the void left by in-house L&D teams who have struggled to keep up

The secrets to success

As the competition heats up, providers will need to find ways to find uncontested market space and differentiate themselves enough to make the competition irrelevant. In our experience, those who have been most successful at this have found strategies to:

• Scale up their digital learning production, without spiralling costs
• Differentiate their online training products to attract and retain customers
• Increase speed to market of online training products
• Access global markets with an efficient way to manage translation and variations
• Future-proof their business, supported by the right technology growth stack

 Where many online training providers fail

Great course content, the backbone of most training organizations’ brand integrity, is no longer enough to keep ahead in the training industry. The modern learner learns on demand – when they want, on any device they want and, crucially, what they want.

Although employees are crying out for digital and blended approaches that provide a mixture of learning resources, experiences, performance tools and social collaboration, many professional training solutions are out of sync:

“Although still containing valid content that may be critical for employees to know, the structure of many classrooms and print materials is at odds with how learners need to access these materials and complete training milestones.” – Conduent

Those still offering long or “one hit” courses are finding they are no longer the right fit for busy, “always on” learners – especially those who need training to fit into smaller pockets of time and be part of a continuous performance improvement process.

To have a place in the future of training, digital resources are a must-have component in any training provider’s mix. But simply converting courses to digital formats will not be enough to compete with Google.

The most successful online training providers know that it’s hard to make digital learning profitable unless they are able to make it personalized to learners, customized for customers and deliverable at scale. They have got solution design down to a fine art. They are making smart choices when it comes to the learning products they’re focused on, the strategic framework they use, their production processes and the technology that enables them to deliver great products at scale.