Using Off-the-Shelf Courses for Training: Boosting Learning Initiatives

Last Updated on

March 29, 2022

Alicja King

If you're looking to introduce new training to your learners, then you'll have thought about the benefits of making your own courses vs buying courses.

Making your own courses is great for reasons such as personalisation, communicating company-specific scenarios, and being able to easily teach the course... since you're the one who created it.

But building every course can be a tall order for anyone to handle. That's why it's good to loosen the reins every now and again and get your courses ready-made.

If you're wondering if off-the-shelf courses are right for you, then here's what you should consider:

Time constraints

Even if you have a simple way to create courses, such as the drag and drop features myskillcamp offer; creating courses takes time. Gathering information, thinking of examples, optimising it to keep your learners engaged... it's a lot.

Plus, when you have multiple courses, multiple departments, and perhaps even multiple languages, it becomes an impossible feat.

With buying courses, especially with myskillcamp, it's as simple as finding the courses and adding them to your training hub.

Creating with multimedia

Especially if you want to maximise the knowledge retention in your courses, making use of multimedia is a great way to start. However, it can be a longer process, especially if you don't have the tools. Even outsourcing takes time and you may not be happy with the results you receive from a third-party. This of course, costs money as well as time.

Similarly, you may want to create the same course in a different language... pretty easy if it's an eBook or a quiz, but what about if it's video content?

Using off-the-shelf content means you have access to thousands of multimedia courses in different languages. With myskillcamp for example, you can find multiple courses on the same subject in a wide variety of languages. We have 18 languages currently, and adding to our list all the time.

Limited expertise

You will have expertise in a few topics, and the courses you create on those topics will be engaging, informative and well-taught. However, there are skills your learners will need that you're not an expert in. Tackling these courses yourself won't result in the same outcome.

Leaving out these courses isn't an option, so buy the courses from experts in field. Myskillcamp has a marketplace full of courses from professional trainers who specialise in a range of topics. Courses from LinkedIn Learning, Bookboon, Coursera and plenty more are all available to our users. Is it time you took advantage of these off-the-shelf courses?

Updating courses

Especially nowadays, processes are constantly changing, updating with new software and tools. This means that courses that were perfectly up to date a year ago may now be obsolete. It's important that whether you're making courses or buying them, they're constantly updated with the newest information. Buying courses from professionals increases the likelihood of a course having the up to date content.

If you have an LMS that lets you easily update courses, such as myskillcamp you can be sure that the off-the-shelf courses are being periodically checked and updated. As not only is it in the self-interest of our training providers, but each course has detailed analytics, reviews and a comment section to quickly alert the course creator of issues.

The cost of courses

If you've decided that you want to buy courses then the next step is looking at the possible providers and choose the best for you. Not just for the courses on offer, but also for their price. If you've bought courses in the past then you may have fallen into the trap of paying far too much for a batch of licenses... few of which are actually used by your learners.

Being made to pay a flat fee is probably not what you want, so choose a provider that offers varying pricing options. That way you're not only getting the best courses but you'll be getting them for the best price.

For example, myskillcamp has three pricing methods, which can be further personalised to give the best fit. Whether you want to choose your favourite providers, pay per course, or pay for a certain amount of courses per year, the choice is yours.

Off-the-shelf

In our opinion, both have great benefits and a mixture of bought and built is the best decision. After all, as you can see from this blog, it all depends on what you can do/what you want to do, and who you buy the courses from.

That's why myskillcamp gives users the option to buy and build, easily.

Not only do we include multimedia course options, so you can build audio, video, quizzes and written courses, but we have over 300,000 off-the-shelf courses you can add to your training hub once you're a user.

Discover out platform, build your courses and choose our professional off-the-shelf options by requesting a free, personalised trial.

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