However, once the full scale of the financial outlay and the length of the project lead time become apparent, it can become a daunting or unviable prospect for all but the largest cash rich organisations. Whilst costs can vary enormously depending upon what is required, it certainly would not be out of the ordinary to pay in the region of £35000 to develop an hour’s worth of online Health & Safety training content.

Take into consideration that this material could take 6 months to develop and must be maintained and updated, the purely bespoke option looks less and less attractive. What about all of the content that exists already at your own organisation? Is there really no way of refreshing and revitalising presentations and videos that you have utilised in the past?

Rapid Production

E Learning providers are quick to make reference to the awards they have won and the resources that they possess, but what do you, the safety manager really want? My guess would be, functional but relevant content, delivered quickly and at a fraction of the costs quoted above.

Of course there remains a place for high end bespoke content, but the industry has recognised the role rapid production can play and e learning providers in the Health & Safety arena have started to  develop  course authoring products.

These content development tools, allow organisations to create entirely new training courses or adapt existing PowerPoint presentations and videos and turn them into measureable online learning content. All of this can be done without any existing programming knowledge.

Buy or build?

However, just because you learn how to use such a tool, this does not make you an expert in producing e learning. The danger exists that content could be poorly designed with confusing content and disappointing graphics.

At EssentialSkillz we have seen our own Content Development Tool (or CDT for short) used to supplement existing generic course libraries. Customers do not want to design entire e learning programmes from scratch. Rather they use the tool to create short company specific courses to compliment their existing portfolio or even just additional modules to attach to an existing course.
The decision is not whether to buy or build. Delivering a relevant safety message through e learning becomes a combination of both.

Changing Relationship

With a wider range of services on offer, our relationship with customers is set to change from one of supply to partnership. A degree of nurturing is often required to move the client to point where they are comfortable using an authoring tool. At the very least some training is required, but often this process goes far beyond simple instruction. From experience we can advise it can be extremely beneficial to work together to design the first module with the client. As confidence grows, customers are then able to forge ahead by themselves.

Outsourcing

In other cases, due to clients’ internal resource issues and times pressures, we have owned the entire development process ourselves. The customer simply supplies the media, that we then merge through the CDT tool and create the course for them. In one particular instance, we created an online course from a video sequence supplied to us. The authoring process was completed in one day and the course delivered just one week after invoice.

So if you have previously written off the idea of creating company specific training content quickly and cheaply, and consigned your presentations and videos to the outer reaches of your hard drive and the back of the cupboard, think again.

Richard Phelps
Sales and Marketing Manager, EssentialSkillz Ltd
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