Revolutionize your digital continuing education courses with Employee Generated Content (EGC)! Discover the power of content created by employees and foster diversity, engagement, and innovation in your company. In this article, you will learn how you can create a dynamic learning experience through internal knowledge sharing and with the help of the blink.it Learning Management System.
Start an EGC Chain Reaction!
Everyone is capable of something. Everyone knows something. Every single person possesses a valuable combination of talents, knowledge, experience, and traits, and as a unique component of the global community, is always exactly in the right place. Through Employee Generated Content, you can use the uniqueness of each employee in your company to build a solid framework of knowledge exchange and multiplication.
In this article, we will talk about the benefits of Employee Generated Content in designing your digital training and onboarding measures, how it impacts your team building, and how you can easily implement the whole thing with a blink.it learning platform in e-learning.
What actually is Employee Generated Content?
Generally speaking, Employee Generated Content (EGC) is — as the English name suggests — content of any format created by employees of your company. Their text, image, or video content describes or presents your company, your product offering, your team, your processes, etc., across a wide variety of channels, such as social media posts, blogs, promotional materials, podcasts — and indeed, in digital training material.
The advantages of Employee Generated Content as content in online courses are obvious:
Authenticity and Relevance: Employee Generated Content comes first-hand, directly from the employees of your company. By reflecting their actual experiences and applied knowledge, their content is received as authentic and is therefore particularly credible.
Diversity of Perspectives: Each employee brings their own experiences, skills, and perspectives. By integrating employee-generated content into professional development courses, learners gain access to a wide variety of perspectives and problem-solving approaches.
Cost Efficiency: Creating course content can become quite expensive, especially if external experts or service providers need to be hired for it. Employee-generated content offers a cost-effective alternative because it is based on the already existing resources and skills of your own people.
Promoting Employee Retention and Development: The opportunity to create and share one's own content strengthens employee engagement and connection to the company and colleagues. It also promotes personal and professional development, as employees can deepen their own skills and knowledge while creating the course content.
This approach is increasingly gaining importance, especially in digital learning environments. Companies are discovering more and more that internal knowledge is often more current and practical than externally produced learning content. Employee Generated Content therefore helps to bring professional development closer to the real everyday work of employees.
Shared knowledge is multiplied knowledge
An open and supportive corporate culture is crucial for the success of Employee Generated Content. Here are a few tips and arguments on how to encourage your employees to provide their own content for your digital training and onboarding courses:
Recognition: Emphasize the importance of employee contributions to training and make it clear to your employees that their expertise and experiences are valuable. Also, give them feedback later on their course contributions so they know how well they did.
Development Opportunities: Highlight how creating content for e-learnings promotes employees' personal and professional development. Encourage them to learn new skills and position themselves as experts in their field.
Co-determination: Encourage your people to suggest topics they would like to create content about, and allow them to contribute and share their ideas with others.
Exert Influence: Make it clear to employees that their content can have a direct impact on the learning and development of their colleagues.
Technical Support: Make sure employees have the necessary technical resources to create high-quality content. Offer training on how to use tools and platforms and ensure they have access to all needed materials.
By combining these approaches and encouraging your team to participate in digital course content as a HR developer, you foster a culture of knowledge sharing, collaboration, and learning that contributes to the long-term development and success of your company. In addition, through the self-created content of the online courses, employees from different departments get to know each other better and learn to appreciate what others are capable of.
Building a Powerful Bridge
By sharing their knowledge and experiences with one another, your employees strengthen relationships across all work areas and age groups and contribute to increasing the overall performance and success of the team and company:
By sharing knowledge and experiences with each other, your people develop a sense of connection and solidarity, which strengthens their cohesion. They recognize the importance of their colleagues as resources and support each other in their professional development.
Furthermore, sharing knowledge creates an atmosphere of trust and openness within the team. Your employees feel encouraged to share their ideas and perspectives without fear of judgment or criticism. The exchange of knowledge and experiences also promotes continuous learning and growth within the community. Your employees feel motivated to expand their knowledge and learn new skills because they know they have support from their colleagues.
Last but not least: When employees share their knowledge and support each other, it increases the effectiveness and performance of the entire team. Your people can tackle challenges together, develop innovative solutions, and achieve more successful results.
And blink.it makes it easy for you!
We know very well that creating your own online courses can be a lot of work. Since our own company philosophy is also built on mutual support and know-how sharing, we have built the Co-Admin feature into every blink.it learning platform for our customers:
After you have set up the structure of your course, you as an admin can set up as many employees of your company as co-admins as you like with just a few clicks. The co-admins can then independently upload their self-created, multimedia content into the learning units ("Blinks") or create it directly within them at any time. In doing so, they can directly see where their content appears in the course and what the whole thing will look like for learners later on. This is a great motivation to participate — and you save a huge amount of time during course creation with Employee Generated Content!
Conclusion
Employee Generated Content shows that effective online courses do not have to originate only from external experts, but can also grow directly from the knowledge and experiences of your own employees.
Employee Generated Content can take digital training to a new level. When employees share their knowledge, learning content is created that is practical, authentic, and immediately relevant to everyday work.
At the same time, this approach strengthens exchange within the company. Employees learn from each other, discover new perspectives, and work together to develop solutions to real challenges. This turns professional development into a lively process supported by many people.
By utilizing this approach in your online courses, you step-by-step create a learning culture where knowledge is not just taught, but actively shared with one another. That is where the true strength of Employee Generated Content lies.
Frequently Asked Questions and Answers
What is Employee Generated Content?
Employee Generated Content (EGC) is learning content created by employees themselves. This includes, for example, texts, videos, instructions, or practical examples that document and pass on knowledge within the company.
What benefits does Employee Generated Content offer to companies?
Companies benefit from authentic, practical learning content, a stronger culture of knowledge, and higher employee retention. At the same time, existing expertise can be efficiently utilized for continuing education.
What content is suitable for Employee Generated Content?
Particularly suitable are practical guides, field reports, onboarding content, best practices, process descriptions, and short explanatory videos from everyday work.
How do I motivate employees to create their own learning content?
Appreciation, simple technical possibilities, sufficient freedom, and the visibility of one's own contribution are important. When employees see that their knowledge helps colleagues, the willingness to participate increases significantly.
