Content Development

It’s the start of the workday and you’ve arrived at the office (or your living room). You check your inbox and there it is: the notification that a new mandatory training lesson must be completed. Let’s be honest, you might roll your eyes at this point. You’ve got 20 other tasks to get done, and spending your time on a somewhat generic lesson about business communication that isn’t specific to your actual job — well, it’s hard to get excited about that. Unfortunately, this is a scenario that is all too common in the workplace: pre-packaged content being delivered to employees who don’t have the bandwidth to engage with material that doesn’t serve their direct experiences. And so at Quonder we started to wonder:

If employees dislike generic training content, what’s stopping more custom content from being deployed instead?

To answer this question, our team started interviewing Learning & Development professionals around the globe about the pain points they experienced in the content creation process within their own training departments. We had suspected that reliance on more generic, off-the-shelf materials were due to training specialists simply lacking the time to produce more personalized lessons. In that same vein, we were confident that their responses to the main question posed — “What would make it easier for you to create more custom content in your company?” — would be overwhelmingly time-centric.

To be fair, the concept of needing more time was certainly mentioned. But an equally common answer was that L&D managers wished more of their colleagues, and in particular, those who weren’t training specialists were confident enough to create their own content. We recognize that our survey data represents only a small portion of the L&D community, but nevertheless, we were intrigued by the recurrent idea that a company would be better served if more non-L&D employees created their own lessons. And why was that, we asked? The response was that employees in specific roles are the ones who inherently know their jobs best, and therefore they know exactly what kind of personalized information would be helpful to thrive in a particular position. Employee training for new hires joining a specific team, for instance, could be created by a current team member who knows precisely what the expectations of that team will be. And while the L&D specialists could then concentrate on creating content for the company at large, if more employees also contributed to the overall knowledge bank, the amount of customized, impactful, content could increase significantly.

Our conversations with L&D professionals highlighted a need for employees to also be instructors, capable of creating personalized training - but, of course, it would be unrealistic for everyone to know how to teach. That’s why at Quonder we’ve focused on developing technology that can turn anyone into a master instructor. Using our authoring system, all a potential instructor would need to know is what they’re talking about - the platform will help them build effective lessons based on the science of learning and memory. So stay tuned, we’re creating the tools that will make it possible for anyone to create powerful learning content.