Report: The Buyer-Provider Partnership: The Key to High-Quality Custom Content | Upside Learning

Key Takeaways:

• Don’t be driven solely by price. A solution that appears to be a bargain on paper may turn out to cost a whole lot more in other areas such as quality, turnaround and communication.
• Find a partner, not a vendor. Custom content development is not simply a purchase and walk away arrangement. An organization needs a partner that understands their needs and their culture. Content that doesn’t take these things into onsideration will miss the mark.
• Look for the right technologies. An outsourcing arrangement is an opportunity to take advantage of technologies that might not otherwise be at your disposal.
• The modern learner is looking for experiences that are engaging, relevant, social and mobile. • Scalability. One of the main benefits to outsourcing is to be able to scale to the organization’s needs without having to rely on internal resources, which are oftenlimited. Be sure to have a partner that can deliverwhen requirements peak.

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Backed by Upside Learning, this report, entitled The Buyer-Provider Partnership: The Key to High-Quality Custom Content by Brandon Hall Group, clearly highlights how the eLearning outsourcing landscape has changed.

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The report talks about:

1. Drivers for outsourcing content development
2. Factors important in provider-buyer partnership
3. Satisfaction with providers and reasons for replacing them

In the introduction writes Brandon Hall Group Research Team, "While learning leaders struggle with technology, strategy and calculating the ROI of the organization’s learning strategies, the truth is that there is no learning without content. As Bill Gates once said, “content is king.” Although Mr. Gates meant it in a different context, it holds true for learning. In recent Brandon Hall Group research on business priorities, developing content was seen as a priority or critical to the business by 68% of companies, second only to leadership development in importance."

Unfortunately, instructional design and content creation aren’t necessarily skills that exist in most organizations. So what can they do? There is a lot of content that is readily available out there, both for sale from providers and free on the internet. But more than half of the companies (53%) say that the inability to customize their content is a significant challenge to implementing the learning strategy, so off-the-shelf material can’t always solve the problem. Which is why many companies turn to experts outside of the organization to create custom content thatmeets their specific needs. 

This report is based on Brandon Hall Group’s ContentOutsourcing Study, which surveyed 206 companies ofall sizes, representing approximately 30 different industries from organizations around the globe. The report will explore the current content outsourcing landscape and identify what’s driving organizations to outsource, as well as what they are outsourcing and the benefits they are realizing.
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Source: Upside Learning