In order for training efforts to succeed, the information presented must be capable of two things. First they must identify specific organizational, audience and subject matter training needs. Next they will address these needs through targeted delivery of relevant and informative content. Who are the most qualified to identify and address these needs? You and your current staff, of course!

Effective training materials require common sense, good communication skills and a willingness to follow a structured, yet flexible and adaptable approach. Many managers, supervisors, human resources staff and other organization members already possess these skills. As a result, they have potential to design and develop a training curriculum that will satisfy the most demanding learning needs in any organizational training environment.

The ability for your organization to design its own quality training materials offers several significant benefits.

There is the obvious economic benefit of cost control. Internal development offers significant savings over outsourcing. Vendors oftentimes have other primary motives such as profitability. They have a need to sell and increase their revenue. Their primary objective may not be to finish your project in the most quick and effective manner.When existing employees are able to design quality training courses in-house, outsourcing to costly instructional design professionals is no longer necessary.

But there is the more-important benefit of content control. Developing effective training materials is a collaborative effort that involves identifying needs, then gathering and presenting information to meet those needs.

A vendor may not be able to readily adapt to your organizational culture and facilitate the required degree of information sharing. In-house employees are already collaborating each and every day. This existing internal interaction can be easily leveraged and optimized in the following areas:

Needs Assessment

Your own employees are living the training needs each and every day. With some initial guidance and learned techniques they will have the best potential for extracting, refining and presenting theses needs so that they can be properly addressed.

Information Gathering

Your own employees have first-hand knowledge of who the experts are in any given area. They possess a natural ability to seek out the right people and obtain the right information.

Design and Development

With a few additional, easily-learned skills, each organization’s own employees have the greatest potential to design a curriculum and create meaningful content that will best address the identified training needs.

Developing current staff into qualified instructional designers offers the following additional built-in advantages:

Inherent Accountability

Employees are naturally more accountable within their own organizational structure than they are to third-party training designers. The overall level of participation and cooperation will likely be higher with an in-house training development effort.

Accuracy & Immediacy

With an in-house training development effort there is little opportunity for misinterpretation of company-specific language or culture. Information is delivered directly in a manner that will be immediately understood by the recipients.

Motivation

Existing staff are the ultimate beneficiaries of organizational training efforts as a result of improved products and processes. They are likely willing to put in the extra effort required in producing quality training products.

Standardization

The organization benefits from a standardized internal training design and development process that provides consistency in the underlying structure of all training materials.