6 Reasons Why You Should Outsource Your Training
Many HR professionals assume that having in-house L&D teams is the best solution for them, but hiring external designers can offer great benefits to your organisation.
Jackafal explores 6 reasons why you should consider outsourcing your learning design and facilitation to optimise outcomes for your organisation.
When we ask HR departments about their L&D provisions, one of the most common pushbacks we receive is preferring to employ learning designers in-house. When we quiz further, we find this is often built on assumptions rather than the realities of what’s best for the organisation for each individual project.
While there are of course advantages to having an in-house team for learning and development, there are also a lot of benefits to outsourcing your learning design to a specialist learning design company, especially if you have a particular project in mind where you need extra hands on deck. Here are 6 of our top benefits to outsourcing your learning design:
Cross-Profession Best Practice
Learning design agencies often work with all sorts of clients in a range of professions. That means they get to see first-hand what best practices exist in a plethora of industries, and can bring all that juicy knowledge to the content they design for you. Whether it’s best practice around teaching techniques, or learning technology, specialist agencies in learning design are often at the forefront of innovation in learning, because it’s what they explore every day.
Outside Perspective
While in-house learning design teams may know the ways of working within the company, which can be useful, sometimes that can be a disadvantage. All employees everywhere fall into patterns and habits over the time they work at an organisation. Sometimes, bringing in a new perspective to shake things up a bit can really challenge your way of thinking and promote growth, especially when looking at challenging topics around DEI.
Efficiency
While staff inside your organisation will often have multiple responsibilities, including admin, attending department meetings and other important (but let’s be honest, distracting) tasks, learning design consultants are focused on one thing and one thing only: the learning itself. Being able to focus on those learning design projects without tackling 500 Slack notifications from 500 different people can make for a more efficient build.
Specialist Knowledge and Experience
If you’re looking for someone to talk about a specific topic, or to bring a particular type of lived experience to the table, you won’t always have that available in house. The beauty of external learning organisations is they may have a range of specialisms or experience you don’t normally have access to. And if they don’t? They will often have a vast network of other contractors and organisations they work with (just like Jackafal does), so they can easily find you someone with a specific specialism or lived experienced who can deliver it and really make your content come to life.
Redraft? No Problem!
While being invested in what you do is important, all too many times we’ve seen L&D teams who are so attached to their work that they are a little precious about edits and strategic shifts… Another advantage to learning design agencies working with a range of organisations, many of whom are growing and need their existing material reshaping to fit their new strategic direction, is that they often incredibly comfortable redrafting. Whether working on new material or editing and reformatting existing, outsourcing your learning design can ensure you keep what works, and scrap what doesn’t, without anyone working on it taking it personally.
Variety Is the Spice Of Life
Sometimes, having a new face in the team to design and/or deliver your learning content can bring the best out in your employees. While having tight-knit teams is important to all organisations, sometimes bringing in an unfamiliar face can give employees the opportunity to really assess their purpose and values in the organisation. Just as a break in routine can get the team enthused again, so can a difference in approach (and a new face to boot)!
Find out more about how Jackafal could help with your learning design and facilitation.
