Libby Webb on how Curation as a Service can help you hit your content sweet spot.

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The Learning & Development industry is awash with content. From blogs and articles to podcasts and videos, there’s something for everyone; for every journey, every learning outcome.

When the L&D community moved away from compulsory training with tick-box exercises and end-of-module tests, content in any form became the driving force of any successful organisational learning strategy.

Mostly, the content available to us is great – truly engaging and relevant to our needs. However, there are some of a more questionable standard floating about the web too.

Finding the right content

For years, we believed that access to a wealth of content was the best approach an organisation could take to fulfil their learners’ needs. Yet, in a typical learning situation, a learner can only process one resource at a single time.

According to findings in the ‘High-Impact Learning Organisation’ study by Josh Bersin for Deloitte in 2018, the problem our learners were encountering wasn’t to do with a lack of content.

In fact, the issue is that there is too much available content, making it a task itself to sift through the bad to get to the valuable.

CaaS is a cost-effective solution for organisations that cannot hire a content curator

Soon, it became apparent that when given nothing but choice, the learner disengages, growing confused and unsure about the content that is right for their specific learning needs.

The role of the content curator

In response, the role of the content curator within an L&D department soared in popularity. The purpose of the content curator is to aggregate, organise and share relevant content with the relevant person via the most appropriate channel.

This isn’t a case of scouring the web to find articles concerning the latest trends and buzz words and loading them into an LMS or LXP. It is far more complex than that.

The content curator must take into consideration the industry they’re working for, the array of roles they’re researching for, and the skills each individual might need to succeed and excel in their specific role.

Not to mention, the vast range of ages and levels of technical skills apparent in most modern organisations will have an effect on the way in which the information is disseminated.

But unfortunately for some, hiring for a content curator as a full-time position just isn’t within their reach. And so, they find themselves almost back to square one.

So what’s the solution?

We’ve always been big advocates for organisations to adopt more ‘curation’ in their approach to knowledge, learning and development.

Following the innovation of the LXP last year, the opportunity for online learning providers, including the leading e-learning provider, Learning Pool, to automate content curation is now more feasible than ever.

Bridging the gap between learners and content, Curation as a Service (CaaS) is an automated process that will deliver timely, up-to-date and expert information, as curated by humans, directly to an organisation’s learning platform, typically an LXP.

What are the benefits?

Content is always from a reliable source: Every piece is reviewed by a real person before it’s loaded on to any platform. Curators sift through content available from the experts and thought-leaders in your industry to highlight the best learning content for your organisation.

Content is sourced to suit your learners: A successful approach to content curation is one that achieves a mix of video, audio, infographics and written resources to suit all kinds of learners and their environments.

Content is always up to date: A feed of fresh and relevant content is updated on a regular basis with CaaS, so you know the content available to your learners is always the most appropriate at their time of need.

The aim of CaaS is to help struggling organisations fill in the missing pieces in their content libraries that cannot be created or bought off-the-shelf, and is a much more cost-effective solution for those organisations that cannot hire a content curator or even creator.

About the author

Libby Webb is a content writer for Learning Pool