In-house vs. third-party training

- Training is expensive. Custom training is even more expensive. In fact, custom training is expensive, time consuming, and often unnecessary. Yes, there are some subjects, strategies, and approaches that should be custom designed from the ground up but too often L and D departments attempt to create all training needed by all parts of the organization and it becomes overwhelming. When setting up or redesigning a training department I recommend creating a expectation that large portions of the instruction will be sourced from outside of the organization and purchased directly from third party vendors. Look, it all comes down to the classic, make versus buy decision. What many L and D professionals don't realize is that there are literally thousands and thousands of externally developed courses that could easily solve 98% of their training needs. If an organization like yours can leverage already existing content you can save thousands of dollars a year in development and delivery costs. Now, the problem will be that the content might not fit perfectly, and that's true. That's where the L and D department comes in. You add customized content before or after the off the shelf content. You describe to the employees how the content does fit in with your organizational culture and you build the bridges between what happens inside your organization and what the off the shelf content recommends. Often, organizations are not averse to buying compliance based training because that's similar across all kinds of companies within a certain industry segment and that's a great place to start. But compliance training is not the only training that provides value from third party vendors. Sales skills across organizations are similar in many ways. Even if the products are a little different. Many organizations use similar sales models and techniques. With some searching you are sure to find the sales courses that are highly aligned with your organization's approach. Then customize the aspects that are unique to your organization's selling process. Leadership, quality, empathy, and diversity training all fit within this same sphere. Leverage what already exists to create effective training programs then use the time and money the training department saves by purchasing instead of building instruction to create truly unique and targeted instruction that gives your organization a competitive advantage. Remember, the training department doesn't have to create all the training in house. What it needs to do is to make sure the right training is available at the right time. Making use of off the shelf or third party training and setting expectations will help you meet those goals cost effectively.