Source Content for Professional Development Courses

Today’s professionals don’t just want favorable compensation. They also want great benefits. Even beyond good health insurance and PTO plans, companies are increasingly offering work-from-home opportunities, wellness benefits, and, of course, professional development training.

Helping your employees expand their skills increases both job satisfaction and productivity. The more someone can do, the greater the impact they’ll make in their job. But even more, great employees want to do meaningful work and acquire the necessary skills to further their careers. A Gallup study found that 87% of Millennials say they consider professional development and career growth opportunities when choosing a job. 

You’ll likely find that many of your employees will be excited to take professional development courses, even if they’re optional. However, the challenge is finding the necessary information to build a variety of courses that cover the topics your employees want to learn about. 

In this blog post, we’ll provide tips you can use to source content for professional development training and create courses using a Learning Management System (LMS) like Mindflash.

Repurpose the content you already have

If you want to train your employees on your product, look no further than the resources you already have. Instead of taking the time to build an entire course, you can repurpose the content used to educate your customers. Here are some examples of customer-focused content that can be converted into employee-training content:

• Webinars – The virtual presentations created for customer training and lead generation contain a wealth of information about your product and organization. Using an LMS, you can seamlessly embed a recorded webinar into a course. 
• Blog posts and whitepapers – Content produced by your marketing and product team can also be used to educate employees from other departments. You can upload both text-based articles and PDFs to courses.
• Support and knowledge base articles – The step-by-step instructions your support team creates can help your other employees become product experts. These resources can also be embedded in courses.

Repurposing your current content is a great way to cross-train employees or prepare them for a senior-level role within your organization. You can ensure they have the necessary product and organizational knowledge to do their job as successfully as possible. 

Do your research

While repurposing content is a great start, much of your professional development courses will need to be produced from scratch. Especially, if the objective is to teach employees new skills rather than educate them on the product. 

Explore the internet and find great resources you can use to build courses. Look for reputable sources that are known for producing in-depth, informative content. Also, search for studies and surveys that contain data you can use to support the main takeaways covered in lessons. 

Use the information you collect to create comprehensive courses for your employees. Start with a framework and fill in the blanks with the details discovered while conducting research.

Embed relevant YouTube videos

Did you know that YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine? And it’s a treasure trove of informative instructional videos that can be used to learn about any topic. 

Google will help you discover endless text-based content you can use to create professional development courses. However, simply embedding an informative YouTube video will lighten your workload. You won’t have to convert a lengthy article or study into consumable bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation.

Video, audio, and text resources combine to create an engaging training experience. Research shows that multimedia training content (content that stimulates different senses) is far more effective than training content that is delivered through a single channel. 

Find experts within your organization

Your workforce is made up of people who are experts in so many different areas. And you can use them as a resource when creating employee training content. Here are some ways you can tap into the knowledge of the subject matter experts within your organization:

• Ask them to produce a training course – Naturally, you can request a colleague build a course focused on their specialization. However, it can take a few hours to create a narrated PowerPoint so some people likely won’t have the time. 
• Create a training course based on an interview – Instead of asking your subject matter expert to complete an end-to-end course, you can interview them and get the information needed for training content. 
• Record an interview and embed it in your course – You can make things easy for both you and your subject matter expert by recording an interview and uploading it to the LMS. Embed the audio or video file and skip the step of converting an interview into a PowerPoint presentation. 

Given the impact of professional development training, course creation should be a collaborative process. Find the right subject matter experts in your organization and ask them to impart their knowledge on the wider team.

Find experts outside of your organization

If you don’t have colleagues within your organization who have the expertise you need, you’ll need to look externally for the right subject matter expert. Here are a couple of tips for sourcing content from people outside your organization:

• Use your professional network – Explore your LinkedIn connections and look for smart people who are willing to share their knowledge. You likely won’t be able to get them to produce a course from the ground up but you can ask them to participate in an interview. 

• Hire a freelance content producer – If you have time constraints or don’t have anyone in your organization focused on training, you can outsource content creation to a freelancer. Find the right experts and hire them to produce end-to-end professional development courses for your organization. 

Take advantage of our content partner

Mindflash has a partnership with video content provider ej4. Our customers can purchase ready-to-use training videos that cover 40+ topics. They provide professionally-produced videos on sales, marketing, leadership, communication, business software, and a variety of other professional development topics. 

Schedule a live demo today to learn more about Mindflash and ej4!

Share this on