L&D staff needs an enhancement in every company due to the workload pressure. Although a company might have an internal L&D department, problems arise when there are many projects.

There can be a requirement for an external training partner who knows where the skill gaps of a company are.

These are the reasons why an external L&D partner is needed:  

• Conducts a skills assessment:

An L&D company knows the difference between how a company is performing and how it is supposed to. It knows how to conduct a needs assessment to detect skill gaps. It can ensure that simulations are handed over to employees, through which real skills can be evaluated. If they are lacking, it’s time to implement a training program.

Tests for assessment

There can be quizzes handed over to employees to check their real skills. There are many red flags for a company that its employees suffer from skill gaps when it has trouble meeting its desired ROI. The company also might have adopted a new technology, and employees might face trouble using it.

A company can use a Likert scale and rate skills from 1 to 5 depending on their importance. Then, evaluate the employees based on their skills. These skills gap can be higher for freshers who have just joined the company.

In that case, an L&D program is not the complete solution; shadowing is the answer, where the novices follow the expert people on the job. Also, every job profile has some skills that are more important than others, and the training should focus on closing the pivotal skill gaps first. For example, in the case of a telesales executive who sells products to customers daily, knowing negotiation skills is much more important than being an expert at Excel.

He can just know how to store data in Excel, but it’s a waste of time when he can’t make customers buy at certain prices.

Hence, for every employee, skills must be rated for criticality, i.e., which skills are more necessary than others. This is the last stage of a skills assessment process. After this process, the company can begin training for skills deemed a prerequisite for job performance and hire an L&D partner if needed.

• Cheaper to use external resources:

The L&D team of a company needs to be supplied with expensive software licenses. But this is not the problem with an external L&D team, which gets its own software licenses, reducing the costs for a company. 

• Access to the best resources:

When an L&D partner is hired, a lot of problems are solved for the company. It’s able to come up with the best output required for training. It gets access to the best training partners in terms of instructional designers.

Furthermore, it has content developers like subject-matter experts who know the topics in detail. Even if such an L&D partner does not have the best people on board currently, it can suggest the most productive resources to a company based on its connections. Especially in the case of technical skill gaps, where finding a subject-matter expert and instructional designers is not so easy.

When a Company has access to an experienced L&D partner, it hires the skilled resources swiftly and saves time. It also hires L&D staff who know the latest eLearning processes and authoring tools. It also knows the technology a certain industry needs to create its eLearning content. 

L&D Partners often help companies fulfil their training needs without hiring resources for a long time. 

• Diversification of resources:

Such external L&D partners also help companies hire resources from other countries, which also helps an organization create resources for local training. It may have trouble finding the right resource for creating training materials for employees of a certain region. But with an L&D partner, all its localization needs are solved.

This freedom to choose resources from anywhere ensures the company can work with resources with complete credibility. It can allow remote work to them, and it’s the headache of the L&D Partner to manage them and get the work done seamlessly. A company can also save costs by opting for resources from cheaper regions than its own. 

Sometimes, better resources also exist for a company outside its own country; hence, hiring an L&D partner is necessary to find them. 

Conclusion

When a company opts for an external L&D partner, it maximizes its productivity with internal and external resources. The company benefits from cooperation between its resources and the L&D partner. It can also give feedback to the L&D partner so that its staff performs to the best of its abilities and any performance gaps are removed on time.

However, a major problem can arise when the in-house L&D refuses to collaborate with an external partner. This can be more troublesome when both kinds of resources work in different time zones, and cooperation is required. So, the company should convince the internal staff to be at their best level with an external partner.