Developing Training: In-House vs. Outsourced

So you want to develop some training, but you're not sure whether to use in-house resources or farm it out to someone else. This post will help you think through the pros & cons of both approaches, while examining some different ways to blend the models. I assume that you are looking for high production value content that will be reused for some extended period of time, not a one-off or something designed to be consumed casually. 

In-house Training Development

Whether you're doing it in-house or hiring someone to build it, there are a lot of moving parts to developing effective training. For content of any length and complexity: 

• Someone has to provide subject matter expertise (SME) on the topic at hand
• Someone has to get that expertise out of the SME in the form of content that actual humans can understand
• Someone has to develop the materials to be delivered, which could be any or all of visual resources like PowerPoint or Articulate Rise; workbooks; handouts; activities and exercises; hands-on labs; any social learning platforms or resources; and assessment activities or questions
• If using audio or video, someone has to script, frame, record, edit, and publish those resources
• Someone has to source or create graphics, charts, infographics, etc. 
• Someone has to copy edit all of this stuff
• If using online training, someone has to put that content into the online platform, learning management system, etc.
• Someone has to do quality control on all of this stuff, during the development process and certainly before it is delivered the first time

That's a lot of someones - and most of those roles bring pretty specialized expertise to the table. But what if you're a lone wolf, jack-of-all-trades training developer and don't have access to those roles? 

In a previous post I talked about how long it takes to develop training - research from one source suggested 1-3 hours per minute of finished content. Even a 20-minute workshop will require 20-60 hours from start to finish. If you're looking at a 3-hour workshop, you can safely estimate 180-540 hours of effort will be required to build it. That's 1-4 months of full time engagement for a single person - and both examples assume that that person also has the SME to do it. 

Outsourcing Training Development to Professionals

So what about outsourcing your course development project to a contractor, consultant, or training development company? You're buying their expertise in adult learning theory, instructional design, training development, digital asset production, access to SMEs, and even their project management expertise. You're also buying access to more resources - that is, they should be able to do multiple workstreams of courses or modules in parallel. 

Outsourcing isn't cheap, either - a recent article by eLearning developers Racoon Gang suggests that a single hour of eLearning with reasonable interactivity and engagement - i.e. not PowerPoint + audio - costs somewhere between $8,000 and $36,000. This would not include your project management and quality control costs, nor any required train-the-trainer or other turnovers, and if you were uploading to a content or learning management platform, that would likely be extra as well (or you'd have to do it yourself). 

Outsourcing Training Development to Volunteers

Sometimes organizations will try to leverage their lone wolf internal developer as a project manager for a volunteer-driven project that uses volunteer SMEs and/or content developers. The volunteers could be internal, for an internally-focused training project; many associations look to leverage their volunteers in one or both capacities. 

But this approach may be the worst of both worlds. Consider the following: 

• Volunteers have day jobs, and lives, and your project may not be their priority. This can massively impact schedules and delivery dates. 
• Volunteers aren't always good at following style guides or formatting and editorial requirements.
• Volunteers may have deep expertise - but be unable to translate that into something others can understand.
• Volunteers may not understand issues around intellectual property (yours or others'), citations, or fair use and may inadvertently introduce legal liabilities.
• If external volunteers are solution providers or consultants, they may have a tendency to use their own solution- or methodology-specific terminology, names, or product names
• If you're farming out work on related content to multiple volunteers, the content they jointly create may suffer from gaps, overlaps, inconsistencies, or even outright contradictions. 

So What's the Answer?

If the question is, which approach is best, you know that the answer has to be, "It depends". If you're looking to develop something good, quickly, you should look for a full-service training development company or consultancy. If you're resource-constrained, you can do it all internally, but it's gonna take a long time - longer than you think because you won't, ever, be working on things with 100% of your availability. I generally don't recommend using volunteers at all for the reasons above - volunteer industry SMEs are critical to the development of things like standards and certifications, but I have rarely had success with them for significant training projects. 

As a lone-wolf or very small training development organization, you might want to focus your efforts on finding SMEs and getting information out of them, and converting that into draft content, but use outside specialized resources for things like digital asset creation, voiceover, video production, etc. 

How Long Does it Take to Develop Training?

One of the most frequently asked questions about training is, "How long does it take to develop training?" Its close cousin is "How much does it cost to develop training?" Of course the answers to both are some variation of "It depends". In this post I'm going to look at some of the variables that go into answering this question. The key thing to keep in mind is that developing training is much more than throwing some bullets into slides and recording them - that is, if you want it to be engaging, meaningful, and valued. There are some nuances around in-house vs. outsourced development, but I'll look at that in more detail in another post. 

The Data

The Association for Talent Development has conducted periodic research on this question - you can see their 2020 results at https://www.td.org/insights/how-long-does-it-take-to-develop-training-new-question-new-answers. They looked at instructor-led vs. e-learning vs. microlearning and different levels of complexity for each. Unsurprisingly today, learning assets are shorter than the hour Chapman uses; setting aside microlearning, the average length of a module was 17-26 minutes and the average time to develop a module was 48-155 hours. At the midrange of each of those ranges, a 21.5 minute module would take 107 hours. Extrapolating that out to a 10-hour comprehensive certificate program to run over 2-3 days, you could reasonably expect it to take nearly 3,000 hours, or 18 months for a single full-time resource. Because of the different skillsets involved, your development schedule wouldn't need to start on September 1, 2021 and go to March 1, 2023 - subject matter experts could be drafting one module, while instructional designers and voiceover talent work on others, and the LMS expert on still others. 

Articulate is a well-known provider of tools for creating training content. Someone asked this question in their forums around 2013 and the general consensus was a minimum of 1 hour per minute of finished training content; courses with significant interactivity were 3-6+ hours per minute of finished content. So again, if you're looking at a 10-hour or 600 minute course, 600 hours is a fair minimum for instructor-led and basic e-learning and it will likely be more like double that - or more - if it's any more sophisticated than PowerPoint and audio. 

The Chapman Alliance has done extensive research on this topic, which you can find at http://www.chapmanalliance.com/howlong/. While the figures are quite dated now, they did provide additional insight by breaking the development time into more granular tasks. For instructor-led classroom training, they suggest the following as percentages of development time spent on the various tasks required. 

• Front-end analysis: 12%
• Instructional design: 16%
• Lesson plan development: 12%
• Creation of handouts: 8%
• Student guide/workbook development: 11%
• PowerPoint or other visual development: 16%
• Test and exam creation: 8%
• Project management during development: 7%
• SME/stakeholder reviews: 8%
• Other: 2%

For e-Learning, the tasks are similar, but there are some differences: 

• Front-end analysis: 9%
• Instructional design: 13%
• Storyboarding: 11%
• Graphic production: 12%
• Video production: 6%
• Audio production: 6%
• Authoring/programming: 18%
• QA testing: 6%
• Project management: 6%
• SME/stakeholder reviews: 6%
• Pilot/Test: 4%
• Other: 1%

In a blended model, some costs could be saved/shared through reuse, most likely in the areas of front-end analysis and instructional design. 

This does not mean that you have to develop a 10-hour course all at once, of course. It's very useful to get content out the door as it's available so you can "kick the tires", make sure it meets the audience's needs, assess the quality of everything from the marketing to the content to the learning management system experience, and so forth. But someone needs to keep an eye on the bigger, course-focused picture to ensure that the various pieces can come together in a logical flow that meets the overall course learning objectives. 

Note that neither set of tasks includes loading anything into an LMS, nor developing any sort of awareness campaigns or other marketing activities, both of which are complex and intensive streams of work. I'll look at how to market training effectively in another post. 

But Webinars! 

By now many non-training-developers will be scoffing at these figures, arguing that, "Well, it doesn't take that long to do a webinar - let's just repurpose those!" Depending on the nature of the content, maybe - webinars can be educational, of course. But they are often not designed as learning activities, with learning outcomes and a content flow that supports them. Furthermore, many sponsored webinars are little more than thinly-disguised sales pitches, and any learning that takes place is completely accidental. This is obviously not true for all vendors, or all sponsored webinars. But it is true for a significant number of them, despite associations' and organizations' best efforts to rein them in. And the same applies for e-books, infographics, etc. - some are good and educational, some are pure pitches. If you take one of those truly insightful webinars or e-books, you'll find the same level of development effort as outlined above. 

The Bottom Line

...is that good, effective training is not an afternoon or a week's work. The project management iron triangle applies here as it does elsewhere: "Fast, cheap, good - you get to pick two." Well-executed training can change the way organizations work, but it takes time, expertise, and experience to build something that is truly transformational. 

ARMA Announces InfoCon 2021 to Go Virtual

The annual ARMA InfoCon 2021 conference, scheduled for Oct 17-20, 2021 in Houston, TX, will be held virtually again this year. The full statement is available at https://www.arma.org/news/578146/.

For more details or to register: https://armainfocon.org/

AIIM Opens Call for Board of Directors Nominations

 Via email: 

We are currently accepting nominations for candidates to serve on the AIIM Board of Directors for a three-year term beginning January 1, 2022. The first Board meeting for selected candidates will be in a non-voting “guest” capacity on December 9 (virtual and optional for incoming directors).

Candidate qualifications include:

• knowledge of key industry trends
• experience in strategic planning, implementation and budgeting
• demonstrated commitment to AIIM and the industry
• willingness to attend four Board meetings per year (most will likely be virtual) with one allowed absence
• AIIM Professional Member in good standing

Nominations may be submitted by the nominee or his/her supporter. The nomination package includes the following items:

• nominee’s current resume
• brief statement from the nominee regarding the role and value he/she believes AIIM should play/provide over the next 2-3 years
• one-page statement regarding the nominee’s contribution to that process as a member of the Board of Directors
• two letters of support from individuals that can attest to the strategic acumen and professional integrity of the nominee

Completed nominations and letters of support can be sent to Boshia Smith, Community/Membership Administrator; questions may also be directed to her at bsmith@aiim.org. The deadline for nominations is Monday, September 27, 2021.

What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been...And What Comes Next

In the fall of 2010, in the heady days of Enterprise 2.0, Atle Skjekkeland of AIIM reached out to me, asking if I knew anyone that fit a new position he was creating. I knew about AIIM, of course - I'd been a member since 2001 when I worked at a small ECM company called IMR and AIIM was the association in our space. I'd also previously served as the President of the defunct AIIM Rocky Mountain chapter, worked on AIIM Standards, and attended and spoken at the annual AIIM conference. I even delivered AIIM's first U.S. public training course, in January 2006, when I was with IMERGE Consulting. 

The position was for a "Director, Systems of Engagement Strategies". The job description he sent me looked like he'd copied it directly from my LinkedIn profile. I suggested to him that I *did* know someone - me. After some discussion, he agreed, and in November 2010 I joined AIIM in that capacity. 

In the nearly 11 years since, I've held 4 additional job titles, all of them focused more or less on training and certification. I helped Atle build the original Certified Information Professional (CIP) certification, which we launched on September 23, 2011. I led the updates of CIP in 2016 and 2019, including updating the exams and developing the CIP Study Guides and the CIP Prep / Foundations of Intelligent Information Management courses. In between, I wrote or updated a number of other AIIM courses, and had the privilege of teaching and sharing with students all over the world. 

Over the last decade I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with some seriously smart people doing important industry things. I'm intensely proud of the nearly 2,000 information professionals that have attained the CIP, and I believe that CIP is the single most important contribution I've made to the industry...so far. 

August 31 marks the end of that chapter of my career. This is by far the longest I've ever spent at a single employer in my professional career, but now it's time to move on. I remain an AIIM member - this year marks 20 years - and I'm AIIM Fellow #223 in perpetuity. 

So what comes next? I have a lot of thoughts. And I'm grateful to everyone for their kind words, and in a number of cases, offers to work together. I'm going to take a couple of weeks to clear my head and really think about what I want out of this next chapter. I know I want to continue to help people in the information management industry. I know I want to continue to help organizations manage their information better because it will make them more successful. I know I want to continue to tell stories and share my thoughts on how we can do what we do better. And I think it's important to do the right things, in the right way, to further that journey. 

I don't yet know whether that means staying in the association space, or going back to consulting, or working for a vendor, or something else. But I do know that I'm excited about the possibilities and that I'm confident I can find an organization that I can help by doing those things. I look forward to this next chapter and can't wait to get started. 

If you need to reach me, you can do so via my permanent email at jwilkins13@gmail.com, or on Twitter at @jessewilkins.