Customized online training courses in web writing, business writing or accessible content

“We require branded, tailored, customized courses in web writing (or business writing) (or accessible content). We want to host the courses ourselves and own the IP.”

Almost every week we get this kind of request from managers in organisations small, large, or very large.

Nearly always, we reply, “Sure. We could do that. But are you quite, quite certain your training needs to be customized? Try Contented first. And do the arithmetic.”

Customized training is a familiar model, one that people are reluctant to abandon at first. But when they think harder about this assumption, managers discover that self-hosted, customized courses in web writing, business writing or accessible content :

• always need to teach the same universal principles
• are relatively expensive and never cost-effective
• must be updated regularly by the client
• must offer technical support from the client
• can never be fully customized, because every department (and staff member) needs to produce different content
• cannot compete in quality or price with the popular Contented courses.

In other words, mass bespoke tailoring is a contradiction in terms. Our clients work in education, engineering, science, business, insurance, libraries, local government, federal government, international trade, retail, IT—the list goes on. But regardless of their particular sector or industry, they eventually opt for the Contented online courses without branding or further tailoring.

On the other hand, it’s pretty easy to tailor a blended training programme for your own staff without recreating online courses from scratch. In another blog post (soon) we will explain how clients develop a blended learning approach. They start with Contented online writing courses. Then they add social training opportunities and customized resources.

Ask Alice and Rachel about help with rollout and follow-up, tailored resources and social support. We make staff training easy.

Read the sequel:
A customized blended training solution for staff content authors, one step at a time

Photo of a tailor at work in Hong Kong taken by Ken Wang. Creative Commons Attribution, Share Alike licence.