To curate or create? That is the question.

Deciding on the most effective way to deliver training to your staff can be tough.

Gone are the days of standing at the front of a function room expecting begrudging participants to take part in team building exercises to demonstrate the importance of ‘all pulling together in the same direction’.

Now we have the world at our fingertips and can design our own way of doing things, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easier for those who are making decisions on what constitutes valuable learning and development.

What’s essential? What’s going to be most beneficial? Do we focus on developing new skills or perfecting our team’s current skills? And a big one – do we create our own content, or do we carefully curate what’s already out there?

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits and challenges of curating and creating content. Oh, and in case you missed it, here’s a little explainer about the differences between the two.

1. Creating your own L&D content

The benefits

• No one knows your staff better than you. You know what makes them tick, what frustrates them, and how best to pique their interests.
• You can create extremely specific content that speaks explicitly to your workforce, giving them the exact information you want them to consume that’s specifically relevant for your business.
• You can update your content whenever necessary meaning nothing is out of date or obsolete.
• You can tweak and adapt your content at any time based on feedback or if you feel it isn’t working or isn’t quite right.

The challenges

• It takes a lot of time to make good content. Sure, it takes less time to make average content, but average content benefits no one and certainly won’t help your staff or company in the long run, so ensuring your content is top-notch is a must!
• Keeping your content up to date is also time consuming, but it is necessary, so you’ll need to audit your materials regularly.
• People consume content in different ways so you may need to make multiple versions of the same content such as videos, articles and audio, to cater to everyone’s needs. It’s important that your team engage with the content so that they absorb it and can use what they’ve learnt effectively.

2. Curating L&D content

The benefits

• Using materials from around the web to support your staff’s learning and development gives them flexibility and options in terms of what they’re consuming, and how they’re consuming it.
• If you use a good online learning platform, your staff will have access to relevant and useful materials and will be able to take ownership of their learning, empowering and motivating them on their career growth journey.
• Your content supply will never run out. There’s always new and exciting articles, blogs, videos, and podcasts that your team can use to learn new skills or develop skills they already have.
• Your team members might realise they want to learn a new skill from a recommendation on their learning platform meaning they’ll effortlessly be broadening their skillset also.

The challenges

• It takes a little of the control away from you and finding the exact content with the exact information you want your team to access can be tricky unless you have a super intuitive platform.
• Keeping your team focussed is important – with vast amounts of materials at their fingertips it’s easy to inadvertently try and take on too much information (meaning of course, they will retain no information whatsoever.) A good learning platform will offer comprehensive reporting so you can check in and see exactly what your staff are learning, meaning you can keep them on track.

Phew! That’s a lot to consider.

Luckily, we’re here to give you some good news. You don’t actually have to choose between curating and creating learning materials and content. You can do both, and your team will thank you for it.

By using a platform like Thirst, you will have the ability to add your own in-house materials to your staff’s essential learning, as well as giving your team access to thousands of other sources, meaning they have the best of both worlds.

By using a platform that allows you to curate and create, you’ll be offering your staff a learning platform they’ll actually want to use, and one that will be hugely beneficial to your business.