6 Benefits of Outsourcing Learning Talent Solutions

Managed service approaches first took hold in the IT Services field and are now being used extensively for learning/training services. Within a two-year period, studies found the percentage of organizations leveraging managed IT services grew from 30% to 66%.1  Today, more than 58% of organizations use managed services for learning, and 84% have established an ongoing relationship with their provider. ^2,3 

Though cost cutting initially played a significant role in the decision to embrace managed services, organizations are finding additional benefits that broadly optimize their overall operational performance. These include: 

1. Faster turnaround times to meet business needs and requirements
2. Reduced costs of lost opportunity
3. Increasing and reducing capacity on demand
4. Filling skill gaps immediately while growing the core team skills
5. Embracing new technology in less time with less cost and risk
6. Focusing on strategic alignment with the business’ goals

Faster turnaround times to meet business needs

As more organizations embrace agile approaches for delivering value, the time from initial concept to delivery has been steadily shrinking in the last decade. High performing, “born on the Web” companies such as Facebook, Google, Netflix and LinkedIn are among the companies that made agile approaches standard processes that allowed them to deliver new products and services within minutes, hours or days.^4,5,6,7    

Today, agile approaches have also become standard methods of operation in more traditional organizations, including government, medical and finance.^8,9,10  The drive to become more agile, which initiated with software development, has permeated every part of the business--including learning functions. 

Learning Talent Sourcing Services can help organizations become more agile by freeing up internal L&D teams to respond to business needs with greater efficiency. Organizations can staff a project for a new need without having to wait for a project in progress to complete. Managers can bring together teams with the required skills quickly, whether it’s a single, specialized skill that’s needed to complement an existing core team or an entirely new team with multiple skills needed to increase the organization’s capacity.

Reduced costs of lost opportunity

It’s a fact that faster turnaround times reduce the cost of lost opportunity. When learning and development teams reduce time-to-productivity, the business becomes much more competitive in the market.

EXAMPLE: 

When new custom applications are selected to increase workforce productivity, but the infrastructure is not in place to immediately execute on training and rollout, significant barriers to adoption and costs start to add up. A snowball effect takes place that will increase calls to support, and the support team may not be adequately prepared to help. As the volume of calls increases, support team responsiveness decreases. As a result, application acceptance can decrease. By providing faster turnaround times, learning departments that leverage the right talent at the right time can provide timely training in support of application rollouts.

Faster turnaround times for training also enables organizations to reduce the cost of lost opportunities that arise if new products and services have inadequate training for sales and customer experience and support teams. Sales teams that lack timely training simply won’t have the information they need to compete in the market--even if they have a competitive offering. Additionally, if customer service and support employees are not prepared to handle customer calls, customer satisfaction (often measured by Net Promoter Scores or NPS) will decrease substantially.
 

Increasing and reducing capacity on demand

Most learning and development teams find that there are peaks and valleys in line-of-business needs and requests. 

Demand often peaks in the early stages of embracing new technology. Teams must modify processes or implement cultural changes, making L&D a continuous part of any short or long-term transformation effort. In these peak times, significant effort is required to ramp up and develop the initial resources. Imagine a reorganization, merger or even a new disruptive change to business models. In this scenario, a sudden increase in capacity is required to meet the needs of all impacted roles, skill sets and geographies. Without a strategic partner to help ramp up the L&D team, these changes can quickly overburden an organization. 

When a major telecom with over $13.4B in annual revenue acquired a smaller company, a shift in mindset and culture was needed for a rapid pivot that demanded new technology and processes. Keeping up the momentum and gaining a competitive edge meant the learning organization had to prepare the company to embrace the required changes. The team successfully managed the process by developing hundreds of resources and artifacts within a 3-month period, in both English and Canadian French. 

By leveraging a learning talent sourcing solution, team members who are skilled in transformations and technology adoption can be added to manage learning needs. If required, these members can be flexible enough to lend extra capacity to the organization after the urgent request is addressed. These valleys can be costly to the organization using a more traditional route to staffing. 
 
One of the top three reasons that organizations are leveraging Learning Talent Sourcing Services is to address surges in demand for new training. In fact, 56% of organizations that leverage managed services do so to handle sudden increases in specific demands.¹¹   

 

Filling skill gaps immediately while growing the core learning team’s skills

Innovative organizations embrace emerging technologies to achieve better outcomes for their learners. However, those organizations may find they do not have the skills in-house to implement new solutions. These solutions can include mobile, analytics, social, games, simulations, virtual reality and many other exciting learning technologies that are currently available to better meet the changing needs of employees. 

The time and expense often associated with ramping up core teams can impact the learning organization’s ability to meet immediate demands, which is not the case with Learning Talent Sourcing Services.  

Organizations can fill skill gaps immediately with experienced professionals. And everything is taken care of - the supplier takes responsibility for vetting talent, validating the professional’s experience, confirming references, and checking the accuracy of work history. The solutions provider can also align the learning candidate with the cultural fit of the company by evaluating communication skills, responsiveness and work ethic. 

 

Embracing new technology in less time with less cost and risk

Embedding new team members with specialized skills can help L&D organizations build up their skills without significantly slowing down the delivery process. Even if the existing team gets the basics of the new technology, keep in mind that they may not yet be well-versed in the ramifications of implementation choices or best practices.

Learning Talent Sourcing Services provide organizations with specialized L&D team members who are experts in the latest corporate learning technologies and serve as mentors throughout projects so that the in-house team can benefit from on-the-job training. Practical exposure helps teams ramp up fast and introduces new processes and techniques.

Focusing on strategic alignment with business goals

When learning tactics, such as managing feedback loops, aggregating analytics and developing learning artifacts, inundates an in-house team, they have less time to focus on the macro goals that create strategic alignment with the business.

Learning Talent Sourcing Services help learning and development staff focus on strategy and business outcomes. 57% of enterprises surveyed in a recent 2016 Global Outsourcing Survey reported that their goal in hiring managed services is to free up their staff to focus on core business alignment, while 38% would like to free up staff to work on more strategic projects.
 

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