If you want your employees to achieve specific behavioral changes or transfer knowledge unique to your cannabis business, you need an eLearning solution that will take time to design and develop. If your learning need doesn’t have any specific organizational implications, off-the-shelf might be a good choice.
The decision comes down to: What do I want? What is my priority? What do I want to achieve in the cannabis industry? And these are the big questions when it comes to deciding whether to go the custom vs. off-the-shelf route in learning and development.
If you want your employees to achieve specific behavioral change or transfer knowledge that is unique to your organization through specifically-designed learning objectives and strategies, you need a solution that will take some time to design, develop, and deploy. If your learning need doesn’t have any specific organizational implications, off-the-shelf might be a good choice.
But before you run out to shop for your next off-the-shelf training, let us make a case for custom eLearning and the value that can only be provided by tailor-made learning. Custom cannabis industry eLearning solutions allow you to do the following:
1. Focus On YOUR Target Audience
Like people, no two (2) cannabis organizations are alike. They attract unique talent and have specific characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. When you consider the unique nature of your cannabis business, taking into account its processes and standards, and attempt to overlay off-the-shelf learning and development products, you will almost certainly see gaps.
When it comes to processes, safety, onboarding, accounting, legal, or even compliance training, organizational specificities almost certainly exist, and a generic approach can do more harm than good. When creating custom eLearning with a reputable vendor, you’ll experience the added benefit of a target audience analysis. Any responsible learning provider starts there.
Intimate knowledge and understanding of your cannabis business and employees inform the decisions that will influence not only the learning design but also the results you’ll see once the learning initiative has been executed.
2. Achieve The Behavioral/Knowledge Changes YOU Require
Even your closest competitors do things a little differently than you do, and that is probably reflected in your relative performance. Each individual, each team, and each department has its own set of goals and objectives. If the gaps between the performance vision and reality are obvious, they should be relatively easy to address.
But for more subtle dysfunctions, you may need to provide your dispensary employees with the organization-specific concepts they might be missing, and not waste their time, and your company’s money, with an off-the-shelf product that does not address the actual need.
3. Create MORE Than Just A Training. Provide Performance Support
With custom eLearning solutions, you can, and always should go beyond simple cannabis training. If you decide to go custom, challenge yourself and your eLearning solutions provider to create something that your dispensary employees will be willing, and motivated, to use after they’ve taken a course and learned something new.
Ongoing Performance Support in the form of applications, resource centers, video libraries, or even simpler solutions such as electronic quick reference cards and guides or electronic checklists can be powerful tools designed to support your employee not only while they are taking their training, but, more importantly, precisely at the moment when they need to use, or at least recall, the information.
Elevating regular custom eLearning to include some form of performance support is quite easy. The only real requirement is opting to create a custom learning asset.
4. COMBINE Seemingly Disparate Subjects
Don’t get me wrong; some subjects are better suited for off-the-shelf purchases. These usually include scientifically conclusive topics such as math, chemistry, accounting, or even engineering. But what happens if you’re trying to educate your cannabis workforce on two distinct, seemingly unrelated topics in the cannabis industry?
This happens more often than you might think, and in a situation like this, a custom eLearning solution is your best bet. From our experience, this is exactly what happens with most, if not all our clients. They like the first custom piece so much that they have us create whole blended learning programs, eLearning portfolios, and full-blown curriculums.
With each new custom eLearning asset, we evaluate what worked, and what didn’t so much, and improve. It seems like it takes lots of resources, and it may. But spending hours sifting through products that you know deep inside are not the exact right fit for your employees, and rationalizing the risk that comes with inherent gaps in such products can also be costly, and in some cases, it can compromise the safety of your workforce.
And we are back at the big question: What do you want? Meaningful lasting change and improvement of your workforce or do you just need to ‘tick a box‘? Believe us, with a brand spanking new, 100% relevant eLearning ecosystem for your dispensary employees will love and your enterprise will be able to tangibly connect its success to them.
Let us know what you think.
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