Take Advantage of Free Self-Paced Content

With the growing popularity of the belief that knowledge belongs to everyone, the expiration of the training vendor is coming. The need for a large group of itnernal instructional design gurus is also on the wain. With open source solutions and freeware affecting the way that people see intellectual property rights, and with universities opening their vaults by putting free course content online, it is only a matter of time before companies realize that the only training design that is needed internally is subject matter expert (SME) training on company-specific topics such as new hire onboarding and in-house processes or home-grown software. Many leadership development and soft skills development courses will still be instructor-led, but more and more companies are also including those competencies in their hiring profiles because they realize that many of those skills do not improve after training (or, at least, not very quickly).

Harvard's recent release of free self-paced training at
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/flatmm/hbrextras/200804/friedman/index.html is a perfect example of what internal training teams will start to include in their intranet sites, learning management systems, content management systems, wikis, etc. What is your training team doing to prepare for this fundamental shift?