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.