Getting the Most from Off-the-Shelf Workplace Learning

Organizations have been sending their employees to external training experiences for a few different reasons. The organization pays to send a person or group of people to courses offered by external vendors because the courses don’t depend on having a large number of enrollees from your organization, and the offerings may offer convenient real-time or online schedules.

So beyond those reasons, how do you ensure the value of that learning and the needs for your own workplace?

Megan Torrence offers these three practices in her article, “Seven Simple Secrets to off-the-Shelf Course Success:” http://www.elearninglearning.com/frs/4942977/seven-simple-secrets-to-off-the-shelf-course-success/download

• Target which off-the-shelf opportunities match your organization’s needs/identify good matches for individuals or groups whether its single or groups of courses.
• Make participation social for those taking it inside your organization whether it’s by providing a lab, or a discussion area
• Add your own materials to bring home the relevance to performance in your own organization.·

Allowing people to share their experiences in your own organization can help someone needing extra support to complete the course itself.  Having access to related, in-house materials ups the performance-support value, when someone may need extra help performing a task that was covered by the course which is now over.

Last, here are a couple post-course strategies that can provide clues as to the value of the organization’s payment for that learning experience: Make it a practice to ask attendees to share how the “off-the-shelf” learning now impacts their post-learning performance (Level 3, Kirkpatrick) or benefits your organization’s goals (Level 4, Kirkpatrick). 

A client’s question for Constant Learning about additional course offerings provided the impetus to explore vendors who could add to opportunities for that client. In addition to learning experiences designed by Constant Learning, Constant Learning was pleasantly surprised about partnership opportunities with these well-established vendors of online courses.

As you look to the right of this post, you can immediately explore the offerings by Ed2Go and UGotClass and enroll in courses from the link. So glad to easily expand learning options with clients as we discuss their particular needs.

Let me know if you have questions about these offerings, and I am happy to follow up. If you are a vendor who would like to add a link to your offerings, please contact me at Constant Learning Org .