In many industries, businesses find that they need to facilitate employee learning and training, but it can often be difficult to find training programs that are specific to the needs of a particular business. In these situations, it is better to contract professionals to design instructional programs that are tailored to your needs.
The reality of many industries today is that new technologies arrive and can be particularly disruptive. Businesses that don’t spend the time to reskill and train employees effectively in situations of technological disruption will find that they are rapidly falling behind rivals. For most businesses, designing complex learning modules to cover all the aspects of new techniques and technologies is something that is prohibitively difficult and time-consuming. It can also be difficult to find or adapt existing learning modules that exactly fit the needs of a company.
In these situations, companies would be well served by contacting independent instructional design consultancy firms. These professionals are adept at creating tailor-made learning programs to exactly fit the needs of clients and to help upskill and train employees. These firms utilise data-driven strategies, blended learning and modern technology to create tailor-made training programs that can be scaled as necessary.
Let’s look closer at why companies should use expert instructional design consultants, the benefits that using instructional design services can bring, strategies that these groups use and the sort of ROI (return on investment) that companies might expect from using these services.
Why Expert Instructional Designers Are Indispensable for Modern Corporate Learning
Making use of expert instructional designers allows companies to create effective learning experiences. These instructional design consultants do far more than just build a learning module for employees to click through; they create an entire ecosystem that is designed to align with overall company and business goals while pushing employees to succeed at learning outcomes.
These tailor-made corporate learning programs are designed based on data, strategic alignment with goals and evidence. These learning and development (L&D) firms are typically staffed by people who have training in user experience, the psychology of learning and in modern digital tools. The blending of these different fields of expertise allows them to create workplace learning programs that will reach employees.
What Are The Benefits of Using Professional Instructional Design Services?
To further break down the benefits of utilising professional instructional designers, there are a number of key ways that businesses can benefit.
Fully Custom Training Solutions
By providing businesses with fully custom training solutions, professional instructional designers are able to train employees effectively. This means that not only will employees undertake eLearning development in whatever skills or techniques need training, but that training will be done in full alignment with the culture, goals and workforce needs of the business.
Custom training solutions vastly increase the training effectiveness when compared to standard learning modules.
Employee Training Made Interactive
One of the key parts of the instructional design strategy that most professional instructional designers use is to ensure that the training modules are interactive and engaging. When people are engaged and interested, they are more likely to remember things, so programs that capture employee interest are far more likely to see strong employee performance improvement.
There are many different kinds of techniques for increasing engagement and interactivity, including utilising gamification, mobile-friendly tools and virtual reality (VR) simulations. The details aren’t important; what’s important is that as employees are engaged more fully, training effectiveness increases.
Constantly Updated with Data Insights
Instructional design consulting is a field that never sleeps; there are constantly new ways to teach and better ways to engage with employees. You can be certain that when you need a corporate training transformation that the firm you hire will apply the most up-to-date and current learning techniques that they can.
Instructional design services are constantly reviewing the data from their previous contracts and using that data to design stronger eLearning development tools to help keep learners engaged for as long as possible.
Learning That Sticks
When a company invests in workplace learning, it wants that learning to be something that their employees remember and continue to use in their everyday work. Professional design services make use of instructional design strategy such as practical simulations, spaced repetition and performance support tools to ensure that the employee training they provide sticks.
Learning and development (L&D) shouldn’t stop when the module ends; it should continue to affect employee performance improvement long after the course is over.
What Are Some Common Strategies that Professional Instructional Designers Use?
While every instructional design consulting solution that you use is going to be unique and tailor-made for your situation, there are some techniques and strategies that are common across modern corporate learning programs, such as:
- Microlearning: This involves shorter employee training sessions that are more focused than ordinary learning. These are designed to fit into busy schedules and help to improve retention by being condensed and information-rich.
- Adaptive learning: A very recent part of some instructional design strategy is to employ AI systems that can recognize patterns in individual learner progress and adapt the workplace learning speed for each individual.
- Blended learning: With so much of modern work taking place digitally or even remotely, modern employee training should reflect this. By offering both eLearning development as well as in-person corporate training transformation sessions, instructional designers reinforce their learning.
- Performance support integration: By providing a range of tools that employees can engage with after a module is complete and they are back at work, learning retention is dramatically improved.
- Learning based on scenarios: A common learning and development (L&D) tool is to run employees through simulations so that skills can be practiced.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but there are some examples of common elements of instructional design strategy.
How to Measure the ROI?
Interestingly, it can be very difficult for some companies to measure the full return on investment that they gain from hiring professional instructional designers. Undertaking an audit of workplace incidents or looking at raw data numbers related to productivity can help, but oftentimes these numbers can mask the true effectiveness that instructional design consulting can have.
In the end, it must fall to individual companies to decide for themselves if the ROI is worthwhile, but just as with any other service, cutting corners with employee performance improvement is sure to lead to disaster.
Final Thoughts
Instructional design services are a key component of modern workplace learning for many companies. These groups offer custom training solutions that allow companies to train employees while at the same time promoting company goals and culture, meaning that training will feel less abstracted from the reality of work than if it were undertaken in a vacuum.
Making use of instructional design services is a smart move for companies looking to skill-up their workforce.
