Take a look around your organization. How many efficient and truly skilled employees do you see? Not more than just a handful! Surprisingly, over the past few years, the numbers of efficient employees have dwindled to a huge extent, courtesy the millennials’ increasingly tendency of making career switches.
A recent survey has found that the majority of young and millennial employees – about 62-65% – would ideally prefer to switch employers or change jobs as frequently as possible. Small wonder then employers are seeking new ways to engage and retain the employees, while fostering efficiency, proactivity, and connectivity. As a result of this, the worldwide popularity of on-going employee training is soaring high, thanks to its incredible efficacy in empowering and retaining employees internally.
However, with on-going employee training, cost matters a lot. According to a recent survey conducted by the Training Magazine, a large number of small and middle organizations across the globe have splurged a lot in training their staff.
Although, the advanced learning technologies have successfully cut down the dependency on expensive classroom instructions, yet it’s undeniable that still a huge chunk of money goes into hiring proficient corporate trainers and producing engaging, customized and effective E-learning contents. To ensure that the organizations don’t lose business capitals to burnout, they have started incorporating user-generated contents.
A Quick Round-Up of User-Generated Contents
So, what is user-generated content aka UGC? It won’t be exaggerating to call user-generated content the bedrock of the Internet. Any piece of content, which is engaging, user-friendly, informative and unique, and created for the web, can be considered as UGC. Some of the commonest UGCs are Tweets, Facebook posts, Tumblr blog posts, YouTube vlogs or videos, Yelp feedbacks & reviews, Pinterest pins, and the likes. However, unlike any random social media post, Tumblr post or Pinterst pin, a proper user-generated content must have a connection with the field of marketing. The well-structured and promotional UGCs can work as the gateways to manifold marketing opportunities in this Internet-driven day and age. Since the past few years, almost every top-tier organization has encouraged the web-users to build quality-driven user-generated contents to promote their services and build a good-will for their brands.
UGCs to Give the Best Bang for Your Buck
Some of the most effective and cost-efficient forms of user-generated contents are blogs, presentations, forum discussions, videos, and the likes. Through such contents, you can provide the necessary guidelines and training to your employees. Make sure to share updates on the new work lessons in the UGCs. Don’t forget to enhance the overall quality of your E-learning contents in the days to come. This is how; you can get the best bang for your buck through user-generated contents.
Reap the Benefits of User-Generated Contents
Upon being utilized to their utmost capabilities, the user-generated contents can spell manifold benefits in training each staff of your company. Thanks to the emergence of advanced LMS, aka, Learning Management Systems, it has become a lot easier to create and facilitate qualitative and industry-standard user-generated contents.
Some of the biggest advantages of using UGC are dug out right below –
- Up-and-Dated
It’s indeed an uphill task to prepare training content audits for updating and upgrading employee training practices. The intensity of such complexity would increase as the SMB training contents rise in number. With businesses swiftly growing and witnessing new challenges on a daily basis, the importance and necessity of updated training contents is soaring rapidly. The pace of transformation and acceleration within the organizations has compelled them to count on more on UGCs.
- Engaging
Unlike most of the E-learning contents, the user-generated contents tend to bank upon interaction instead of absorption. UGCs are mainly ideated to drive employee engagement with different training materials i.e. feedbacks, recommendations, discussions, etc. Backed by such interactive approach, the trainees will feel more engaged and immersed into the training materials. This apart, they will also gain a huge sense of ownership in everything being taught. This will help in breaking monotony, thus adding to employee engagement and retention.
- Affordable
For a small or even a mid-sized organization, it’s quite natural to feel overwhelmed by the sky-reaching costs of E-learning. However, with the right software in place, the user-generated contents can bring down employee training costs by leaps and bounds. By investing just a few hours in contributing forum discussions, blogs, and otherwise, the content creators of your company can spend more time in meeting several other responsibilities.
In a Nutshell
Whether you are looking to keep up with the old-school classroom training or dip your feet in the water of advanced E-learning, you should brace up to reap the hitherto unexplored benefits of user-generated contents.
Digital Content Specialist.
