Planning a dream holiday to Europe? You can either plan it on your own or reach out to a travel agency. Let’s assume you opt for the latter. The travel agent asks you a few questions, including the purpose of your travel and budget. Based on your inputs, the agent offers you their readymade holiday package of 5 nights and 6 days covering Paris, London, Prague, and Rome. It includes a 3-star accommodation and guided tours. All this well within your budget. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?
Let’s see how this example fits in the training world. Many organizations use readymade or off-the-shelf training courses to train their employees on common topics, such as compliance, soft skills, cybersecurity, or software training. This type of training courses has its advantages:
- Easily available
- Quick to implement
- Meets most of the organization’s goals
- Cost-effective
Let’s take you back to your dream holiday. You tell the agent that the package looks good, but you are more interested in art and culture and would like to spend more days at each location. The agent then asks you more questions to better understand your requirements and suggests a customized package covering Paris, Rome, and Florence, which is more or less within your budget. Now, this ‘customized’ package turns out to be your perfect dream holiday.
Does the term ‘customized’ work in the training world as well? Yes. Every organization has unique business goals and therefore their training needs can be unique. The off-the-shelf training courses may not work for those unique training needs. This calls for ‘customized’ training courses, which take into consideration both the needs and learner profile. The main advantage of ‘customized’ training is that it contains exactly what you need. Secondly, you own it and don’t have to pay for it year after year as you would for off-the-shelf training.
Choosing Between Standard Off-the-Shelf and Custom Learning
Before deciding on whether off-the-shelf or customized training courses would work for your organization, consider the following questions:
- Does the training need to focus on your employees’ specific skill(s) or knowledge gap(s)?
- Do your employees need a product, process, or technical training that is unique to your organization?
- Would your employees be more engaged if the training included examples, scenarios, incidents, case studies from their day-to-day work?
If your answer to any of the questions is ‘yes’, you’ll probably need customized training solutions.
Hurix has provided several custom learning solutions to global clients across industries. Here are some case studies:
Case 1: Phishing Attack Prevention
Business Need:
A client’s employees were targeted with phishing attacks on their official email address. The client wanted to make their employees aware and be vigilant against phishing attacks by scanning emails based on a set of client-defined phishing red flags.
Custom Learning Solution:
To meet this training requirement, Hurix developed a 15-minute custom learning course. The course contained a good mix of visual and activity-based learning from real phishing emails that employees received in the organization.
Solution Highlights:
- Immersive Learning: The course has several activity-based screens, offering an immersive learning experience.
- Visually Engaging: Infographics and learning-supported visuals made the entire course visually engaging.
- Personalized Learning Experience: Learners were prompted to enter their first and last names at the beginning of the course. As the learner attempted each activity related to identifying a phishing email and its red flags, their name was displayed in each of those fictitious emails and the feedback they received after submitting the activity. This created a simulated work-like environment.
- Levels of Activities: All activities had two levels – Level 1 was to identify whether the email was a phishing email, if yes, then Level 2 was to identify the phishing red flags. This ensured that the course met the overall objectives of the training at an application level too.
Interactive Learning
Feedback
Infographic
Activity
Case 2: Information Security Awareness Training
Business Need:
A client required an end-to-end learning solution aimed at ensuring ISO 27001:2013 compliance. The solution had to focus on both adoption and awareness of relevant ISO standards and policies.
Custom Learning Solution:
To meet this training need, Hurix developed a comprehensive awareness campaign designed to effectively catch employees’ attention, motivate them to learn about ISO 27001, and provide clear, relatable, and engaging information that prompted them to take appropriate action.
The solution deliverables included campaign-related emails, desktop wallpapers, screensavers, learning nuggets, and assessment.
Solution Highlights:
- Continuous Learning: Hurix provided the client with a tentative calendar, enabling them to roll-out the deliverables of the campaign in a sequential manner over a few months. The client could repeat the campaign as per the required frequency, thus enabling continuous learning.
- Microlearning: Online, self-paced, microlearning in the form of desktop wallpapers, screensavers, learning nuggets proved more effective in capturing, retaining, and recalling bite-sized information as opposed to single, lengthy training courses.
- Evaluation: The awareness campaign ended with a scenario-based assessment to assess the learner’s understanding of the standards and policies. This in turn helped evaluate the overall effectiveness of the campaign.
Learning Nugget
Desktop Poster
Screensaver
Case 3: Conflict Resolution
Business Need:
A client wanted training on conflict resolution for all its employees. The purpose of the training was to prevent conflicts between employees and enhance employee communication and teamwork, improve performance, and increase productivity. The client wanted the course to be highly engaging.
Custom Learning Solution:
Hurix developed a 30-minute engaging scenario-based eLearning course. The course included examples of day-to-day workplace conflicts using animated characters. This approach made it easier to understand concepts, such as, what is conflict, its types, and better ways to manage conflicts.
Solution Highlights:
- Engaging Scenarios: Scenarios create a very engaging learning medium where learners can relate better to the subject matter.
- Visually Engaging Illustrations: The illustrated style of characters used made the learning light and engaging, while still maintaining the seriousness of the subject.
- Scenario-based Activities: The scenario was interspersed with practice activity questions to enable the learners to think and react to the situation. It put them in the situation and thus checked their understanding of the concept being taught.
Scenario-based Learning
Scenario-based Conversation
Scenario-based Question
In conclusion:
Basis the above mentioned case studies, it is quite clear that custom solutions are always better than off-the-shelf ones.
Let us look at the dream holiday package example once again. Would you rather visit places of your specific interests or just go along with the crowd? You might miss out on certain things that are not included in the general holiday package. Surely, you do not want something like this to happen while designing a training program.
Creating custom courses gives you control over planning the ideal training program that addresses the organizational goals and individual learning needs, along with delivering a highly personalized learning experience. Custom course creation is all about understanding the user’s requirements and providing exactly the right solutions to meet those requirements. At HurixDigital, we develop custom training content for organizations across different sectors. Get in touch with us to develop highly compelling and engaging training courses for your employees.
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