An L&D Team's Journey from Cost Center to Revenue Generator

I feel lucky to have fallen into a field I love: instructional design. It’s a great mix of technical know-how and creativity. Almost two years ago, I joined one of the world's largest professional services networks as a senior instructional designer.

My job is to take our in-house subject matter experts’ (SME) content and convert that into engaging and insightful elearning for our employees. To me, instructional design is about translating content in the best possible way for each learner. Our aim is to help our peers to continue their industry education in-house, develop new skills, improve their performance... all in a worthwhile way that fits with their busy schedules. 

By creating this level of training internally, we discovered our team could even contract out our services inside the company—turning our department from a cost center to a revenue generator.

Engage & Train a Diverse Workforce with a Modern Approach

When my colleague and I came on board as senior instructional designers, we wanted to make an impact. My company's elearning at the time was more linear—geared toward regulation, compliance, and behavioral themes. There was a lot of narration, and the material felt a little dry. This is often the norm at global accounting firms like ours.

To ensure our employees were getting the best education to grow in their roles, we wanted to make the module content shorter and punchier. More digestible content would ensure greater engagement. We also wanted our modules to be more modern and responsive. With a growing number of our employees wanting to use their own devices, we needed a system that could work anywhere. We did some market research, tried out a handful of options using free trials, and discussed what would be best for our needs. With all of the different elearning solutions that we tried out, Elucidat was the clear winner.

We created a few courses in Elucidat just to see the response, and we got some great feedback. Every new hire in the company would receive onboarding training modules, so we thought that would be a great way place to start. We revamped old modules into Elucidat, and they now have a much fresher feel. The younger demographic of many of our new hires is very comfortable using an interface that mimics a website—navigating the menu, scrolling, and other normal digital behavior.

The speed of authoring definitely set Elucidat apart. While I was more familiar with an open-source software called Adapt, it was a little more complex to build a page compared to how simple it was in Elucidat. We can add elements, delete them, and move them around. The software is very user-friendly. This ability to easily build modules is great because it allows me to build whatever is in my mind, but it’s also crucial to help us move quickly as a two-person team.

Create a Nimble Process

With only two of us producing elearning course content, we needed to put a repeatable process in place for our small team.

Each week, we meet for an hour to understand our pipeline of requested content. We’ll then divide up the work based on our availability. These planning meetings are absolutely essential.  

Once we have our plan laid out, we meet with the SMEs. This is where my experience comes into play. Our SMEs know their content, but we know how people learn. We’ll sit down with them to understand their objectives and get their source content (mainly PowerPoint presentations or user manuals). If they struggle to visualize the final product, we’ll create a mockup of a few pages to help them get a better understanding of how it will look and flow. We use that information to create a module map for how the course should run and what content should be where.

Once we’ve laid out the course, that’s when we hand it back to the SMEs. Using Elucidat, they’re able to leave comments right on the platform. Like I said, they know their subject. Perhaps we’ve missed a certain aspect or we didn’t dive deep enough. It’s sometimes tough balancing their vision with ours, but we can always find the right mix. Having all feedback live within the platform makes the process much easier—and quicker. With only two of us producing content, the speed factor is imperative.

Despite the fact that there are just two of us creating these elearning modules, we work incredibly fast. Over the past 16 months, we’ve launched 125 courses across two different platforms geared to 100 to 1,000 learners each time. Naturally, quality and speed are key. Any hold up, usually, is with the SMEs taking time to review and make their changes, because often they will ask their peers to review the course content and test it and collate their feedback. That process can take a week or two but is much quicker within Elucidat than our previous approach.

Once we release the modules into the wild, we get to see the results of our hard work. Sometimes the modules won’t always hit their mark first time round, and we’re okay with that! Cultivating an atmosphere of constructive feedback and dialogue is critical to a module’s success with its target audience. If a course doesn’t have the engagement levels that we want, we try to understand why early on using Elucidat’s analytics and user feedback. Perhaps we’ve used too much jargon or there’s a particular page where engagement is dropping off. Whatever the reason, it’s a chance to learn.

The Internal & External Sell: Generating Revenue from Expertise

Our team’s initial work in the UK was highly successful. The modules were getting visibility throughout the company, and our US team reached out about a new project about the brand identity. All they had was a PowerPoint presentation and they wanted to create something more interactive and engaging.

But this wasn’t a normal project. Because the US office is a member firm to the UK operation, we could charge them for the work. We created two elearning modules for the US team and charged them a few thousand dollars for that work. Our work was so well received that they wanted to translate those modules into several different languages. Elucidat has a really efficient translation process, so we’ve been able to monetize Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French, and Portuguese translations. These modules have since gone global, so that was a big win for us.

We've also created content for another department in the UK, they wanted a range of elearning modules to cover fraud, bribery, and corruption. They use these modules internally, but now want to resell these elearning courses to their clients. 

Initially, the concept of charging other departments within our company sounded a bit odd, but it makes so much sense when we realize we’ve saved those teams from outsourcing the same service, and then allowed them to recoup their costs and more by monetizing that product. It's a win-win.

Our two-person team has achieved so much in such a short period of time that we’re now referred to as the internal business school. In two years time, we hope to be in a position where the business school elearning team is a fully-fledged internal business so we can sell our skills to other departments and, potentially, external clients. Having the right tools and technology to help us on this journey is essential. I love that I’m able to help my company become more compliant, develop skills company-wide, and generate revenue at the same time.

I already know I have the best job for me. I get the best of both worlds: I can embrace my logical, organizational side and use my creative eye to make the lessons look great and design functions like animated videos. The role is a great mix of everything and it’s great to know we’re having such a positive impact across the business.