Collaborative Consumption in Corporate Training: Make your Learning Department a Profit Center
In these difficult times, it’s essential to find innovative ways to do more with less, to repurpose or recycle existing resources and to find creative solutions for workplace challenges. These economic pressures are driving the growing trend toward collaborative consumption: Sharing or renting instead of buying. Car sharing services like ZipCar and rental sites like Airbnb are examples of the growth of collaborative consumption platforms in the marketplace.
As a corporate training manager, perhaps you see yourself as a buyer - someone who would shop for training courses to share with your colleagues - but in the collaborative consumption model, buyers are sellers too.
OpenSesame is an elearning marketplace - a platform where many sellers share their content with many buyers. We’re also a platform for collaborative consumption; we’re a place where unused or under-used resources can find a wider audience. You can use OpenSesame to connect your company’s training courses to a wider audience.
If you have excellent elearning courses you’re creating for an internal customer base - why not share them with an external customers as well? Add them to the OpenSesame elearning marketplace. Sell them to thousands of buyers worldwide. Make your department not just a place your organization spends money, but a place where the organization’s investment earns revenue.
Do you make sexual harassment training? Sell it. Safe driving training courses? Sell those bad boys. Videos on appropriate telephone techniques? Sell ‘em.
A Few Things to Think About
If your training courses are branded with your organization’s look and feel, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you work for Starbucks, for example, and the topic of your course is customer service, your company’s branding would offer another degree of confidence in the quality of the content to potential buyers.
Just as the Disney Institute and McDonald’s Hamburger University are corporate training destinations not just for their own employees but for a broader population of business leaders, your company’s elearning courses can find an audience outside your doors.
(Of course, while your branding may add value to your elearning course, please be sure to remove any proprietary content your organization may wish to protect.)
Be the Future
Take this idea to your organization’s leaders. Demonstrate that your expertise and skills - and products - are worth something to a broader audience. Please get in touch if we can help walk you through the process of selling training courses or if we can help you develop a business case to share with your peers.
1 Review
is a great idea! We ourselves are a part of it by enabling peer-to-peer carsharing in Germany on http://www.rent-n-roll.de/. We are glad to see that elearning is becoming more popular, and that your article calls for the sharing of elearning courses. Even if it is not always for free. MIT open courseware (free) is exemplary here...